In a bid to exonerate people who might have been wrongly convicted, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wellington Ku (顧立雄) yesterday introduced a draft bill advocating the relaxation of restrictions when convicts request retrials through DNA retesting.
The lawyer-turned-lawmaker said that under Article 420 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (刑事訴訟法), a convict may request a retrial when new facts or evidence surface; however, in practice, prosecutors are often reluctant to take a case to court for retrial, which hampers efforts to uphold justice and ensure fairness in the judiciary.
Past incidents have proven that prosecutors and judges are prone to mistrials when the DNA of two or more people had been mixed in biological materials or the amount of DNA collected was too small, Ku said.
Under the proposal, a court should act in accordance with the principle of reasonable probability when a convicted person requests retrial, meaning that it should base its judgement on whether one or more pieces of evidence had not been subject to DNA testing, or when new advancements in DNA testing technology compel that a new test would be in a convicted person’s favor.
The court should not reject a request for DNA retesting on the grounds that the person had pleaded guilty or had given their testimonies, the proposal said.
Lawyers and academics at the hearing expressed support for Ku’s proposal, with several people citing efforts by the US-based nongovernmental organization Innocence Project, which has helped overturn convictions on 337 people as of March, adding that the draft bill could help the nation achieve similar results.
National Taipei University law professor Lee Rong-geng (李榮耕) said all US states have passed laws similar to that proposed by Ku.
He said that prosecutors who recommended conviction of a suspect are led by their investigations to believe that the suspect is guilty; therefore, the right to receive applications for DNA retesting should rest with a court, as it is against human nature for someone to go against their own judgement.
When deliberating over whether to grant a convicted person a new DNA test, the court should contemplate whether doing so would be in the favor of a convict, which is the essence of such a legislation, Lee said.
In response to suggestions made on overhauling the application procedure for DNA retesting, Ku said that to prevent a request from being rejected by prosecutors, convicts’ lawyers should be allowed to file the requests directly with judges or simultaneously with judges and prosecutors, to boost convicts’ chances of retrials.
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