Prosecutors have yet to determine whether to incarcerate former first lady Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍), Deputy Minister of Justice Chen Shou-huang (陳守煌) said yesterday, adding that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has not issued any instructions on the matter.
The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office will have experts assess whether Wu, who is confined to a wheelchair, is healthy enough to serve her sentence in a jail after obtaining her complete medical records, Chen said.
“As long as Wu’s health is good enough to withstand incarceration, she will have to serve her prison sentence,” he said.
He was responding to a report by Next Magazine, which quoted anonymous “reliable sources” as saying that the government reached a consensus at a high-level meeting convened by Ma in November last year that Wu would not be jailed and that the Ministry of Justice was asked to deal with the technical details.
The report alleged the decision was made on Nov. 15 when Ma hosted a weekly lunch meeting with four other government bigwigs — Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義), Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰).
Dismissing the report as “groundless,” Presidential Office Spokesman Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) yesterday said he felt sorry for the weekly because it violated journalistic ethics by failing to check the facts before it printed the story.
“The president has never intervened in any legal case in any way, no matter whether it is under investigation or in trial, not to mention when the sentence is carried out,” Lo said. “He always respects related agencies’ legal and professional judgments.”
Wang also dismissed the report when asked for comment.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) officials also denied they had any knowledge of such plans, saying they only learned of the accusations at the same time as the public.
DPP Legislator Pan Men-an (潘孟安) said that if it was found to be true that the president instructed officials at the judiciary to keep Wu out of prison, it would have dangerous implications for Taiwan’s democracy.
“If whether or not someone goes to jail rests on a decision by the government, where would be the justice and fairness in our judiciary?” he asked. “It’s an extremely dangerous [thought].”
In response, Lo said the DPP has made many “distorted political judgments” on Ma and that he would leave it to the public to determine whether they are true.
Wu and her husband, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), were each sentenced to a total of 19 years in jail by the Supreme Court in November last year for taking bribes while Chen Shui-bian was president.
The Taiwan High Court ruled last month that Wu and the former president would each serve 17-and-a-half years.
Chen Shui-bian, who had been held at a detention center since late 2008, was moved to Taipei Prison in Taoyuan County on Dec. 2 last year to begin his sentence. Prison authorities are now considering how Wu should serve her sentence, given her health condition.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY VINCENT Y. CHAO, FLORA WANG AND CNA
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