Human rights advocates yesterday urged President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) to pardon Chiou Ho-shun (邱和順), the nation’s longest-serving death row inmate.
Representatives from Amnesty International, the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP) and other rights groups told a press conference at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei that independent investigations have shown that Chiou was tortured and forced to confess to the crimes he was sentenced for.
“No one should be tortured. No one should be tried unfairly. No one should wait 33 years for justice. No one should be sentenced to death, period,” Amnesty secretary-general Agnes Callamard said via video link.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
“Dear president of Taiwan, I urge you to use your powers to make things right, to address the violations of the right to fair trials that have tainted Chiou Ho-shun’s conviction, to uphold international human rights standards ... and to accept Chiou’s petition for a pardon after 33 years of injustice,” she said.
The human rights campaigners then walked to the Presidential Office Building and handed over petition letters that included 42,700 signatures gathered in a renewed global campaign for Chiou’s release.
Amnesty International Taiwan secretary-general Chiu E-ling (邱伊翎) said that executives and secretaries-general of the group’s chapters in Australia, Spain, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal have written personal letters to Tsai to appeal for Chiou’s pardon.
“The authorities conducting the investigation used torture and inhumane treatment to force Chiou to sign the confession papers. Yet our justice system is unwilling to face its egregious errors,” TAEDP chairwoman Chang Chuan-fen (張娟芬) said.
“We still have time to appeal for this innocent man as he is still sitting on death row... We also ask the government and the justice system to seriously face the physical suffering and mental torture Chiou had been subjected to all these years, and we demand an end to it right now,” she added.
Su Chien-ho (蘇建和), who spent 21 years on death row in the Hsichih Trio case of 1991, but whose conviction was overturned and was released in 2012, presented a written statement to appeal for Chiou.
“The government must have the courage to face miscarriages of justice, of convicting innocent people, and learn” from its mistakes, Su said.
Chiou was among 12 people accused of killing insurance agent Hung Yu-lan (洪玉蘭) in Miaoli County, and kidnapping and killing nine-year-old Lu Cheng (陸正) in 1987.
After repeated appeals and retrials, Chiou was the only defendant to receive the death sentence, and has been on death row since 1989.
In 2011, the Supreme Court rejected the 11th appeal against the death sentence.
However, four independent investigations by the Control Yuan concluded that Chiou should be pardoned, as evidence showed that he did not commit the murders, and that the judicial process was flawed as the judges did not hear testimonies from key witnesses and the defendant, and did not conduct a proper review of the case during the appeals.
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