When Will the Judicial Nightmare of Framing the Innocent End? ～Interview Stories of Person-of-Interest Bank Account Cases, Part 5

Why did I inexplicably become a fraud suspect, and why must I constantly fear others discovering a criminal record in the future? Why, despite having done nothing wrong, must I fear being mocked as a fraudster? When the police had already busted the scam syndicate that deceived us out of our account, and the syndicate even admitted the account was obtained through deception, how could I be charged with aiding and abetting fraud? Meeting with the interviewees, Mr. and Mrs. Sun, that day, one could clearly and profoundly feel their resentment toward the justice system.

The Beginning of a Nightmare: Providing the Wife's Account for Job Hunting

At the time, although both Mr. and Mrs. Sun had jobs paying a monthly salary of over NT$30,000, Mr. Sun happened to be affected by a friend's default on a mutual aid association (hui), had a baby crying out to be fed, and still had car and housing loans to pay. Even with dual incomes, they could not make ends meet. To increase his income, Mr. Sun thought about taking on a side job. He saw a job advertisement in the newspaper recruiting a driver. After contacting the other party, he was told that the job was to "drive young women around," and that Mr. Sun needed to provide a bank account. The money for the women and his salary after completing sex work transactions would be wired to this account. The other party also stated that to test whether the account was usable, he still needed to deliver the ATM card and PIN, and promised to return them in three days. Therefore, Mr. Sun decided to use Mrs. Sun's unused account to apply for this job. Mr. Sun never imagined that this would be the beginning of a nightmare...

The Scam Syndicate Admits to Deceiving Them for the Account, the Husband is Not Indicted, but What About the Wife... Prosecutor: "Indicted!"

Shortly after Mr. Sun provided the account, the police cracked down on the scam syndicate that had defrauded him. Mr. Sun even went to the police station to identify the syndicate member to whom he had handed the ATM card and retrieved Mrs. Sun's ATM card. However, both Mr. and Mrs. Sun were still referred by the police to the prosecutors office for investigation on suspicion of aiding and abetting fraud.

The couple, who had no idea what was going on, could not afford a lawyer due to financial pressure and lacked appropriate assistance from professionals. When initially referred to the prosecutors office, Mr. and Mrs. Sun failed to attend the court hearings because they had moved and did not receive the prosecutor's subpoena, resulting in their arrest in handcuffs. Their cases were assigned to different prosecutors' offices for investigation, which unexpectedly led to completely different fates for the two cases. The prosecutor handling Mr. Sun's case decided not to prosecute him because the confession of the cracked-down syndicate member (stating that the dummy account was obtained through deception) matched Mr. Sun's testimony. Unluckily, Mrs. Sun, whose bankbook was taken away by her husband, was indicted instead...

Inability to Remember, Explain, or Record Accurately Equals... "You're Lying! Guilty!"

The main reason Mrs. Sun was indicted was that the prosecutor determined she knew Mr. Sun was applying for a chauffeur job and still lent her account to Mr. Sun to use. But did things really happen this way? Let's take a look at the record of Mrs. Sun's interrogation:

Police: "When did you hand the bankbook and ATM card to your husband?"
Mrs. Sun: "I handed the bankbook and ATM card to your husband on March 8." (The original text literally reads "your husband")
Police: "Why did you hand the bankbook and ATM card to your husband in the first place?"
Mrs. Sun: "I had always kept the Hwa Nan Commercial Bank bankbook and ATM card in the drawer. Later, my husband told me he was applying for a job, so he took the Hwa Nan Commercial Bank bankbook and ATM card away."

At first glance, the police interrogation record shows that Mrs. Sun handed the bankbook and ATM card to Mr. Sun knowing that he was going to look for a job. But in fact, the method of questioning and recording in police interrogations can be both leading and distorted.

The police did not ask: "How did your husband obtain your account?" (without presupposing the method of acquisition) but directly asked: "When did you hand the bankbook and ATM card to your husband?" (presupposing that the wife handed it to the husband, with the only question being when). Judging from the transcript, Mrs. Sun followed the police's logic and "confessed" that she was the one who handed the bankbook and ATM card to Mr. Sun. The police then asked: "Why did you hand the bankbook and ATM card to your husband in the first place?" This also directly presupposed that Mrs. Sun handed the bankbook and ATM card to Mr. Sun, only asking about her motivation. As seen from the transcript, Mrs. Sun similarly followed the police's logic and "confessed" that she handed them over because her husband requested it for job hunting. It must be specially explained that using leading questions does not mean the questioner "intentionally" aims to frame the interviewee; this questioning pattern may stem from the questioner having already ascertained a certain fact, or simply from ossified investigative habits.

Facing leading questions, an inexperienced party might unknowingly answer in alignment with the questioning style of someone in power. Once removed from that interactive context, they might give a different account. In fact, Mrs. Sun later consistently and explicitly maintained that her husband took her bankbook and ATM card without her consent, and only later told her it was for job-hunting purposes. Unfortunately, the judiciary tends to out-of-contextually view this situation as "inconsistent statements before and after." And "inconsistent statements before and after" implies that the party is "lying," while "lying" implies that the party is trying to hide the "truth unfavorable to them"—and the so-called "truth unfavorable to them" is the "fact of guilt" in the eyes of the judiciary!

Aside from leading questions, another issue is: Is the record accurate? The transcript records the gist of the Q&A, and the choice of what to record or not record lies entirely in the hands of the recorder. The party may not necessarily know what recording, not recording, and how it is recorded will make the crucial difference between guilt and innocence. Taking Mrs. Sun's answer as an example: "I had always kept the Hwa Nan Commercial Bank bankbook and ATM card in the drawer. Later, my husband told me he was applying for a job, so he took the Hwa Nan Commercial Bank bankbook and ATM card away." The implicit chronology in this sentence is: "Mrs. Sun first knew Mr. Sun was looking for a job," and then "allowed Mr. Sun to take her bankbook." But without listening to the audio recording of the police interrogation, there is really no way to truly confirm whether the party actually established such a clear chronology at the time of the statement. Or whether the words merely mentioned in a fragmented way, "I put the bankbook and ATM card in the drawer, my husband took them himself," and "I knew my husband went to look for a job" (but only found out afterwards).

Once a confession is obtained through leading questions, it may subsequently be used to "manufacture" other confessions under the nice-sounding names of "exposing the defendant's lies" or "uncovering the truth." Let's take a look at Mr. Sun's prosecutor interrogation transcript:

Prosecutor: "When your wife handed over the bankbook, ATM card, and PIN of the aforementioned account to you, were you aware that you were going to use them to apply for a job?"
Mr. Sun: "Yes"
......
Prosecutor: "Your wife stated that when you applied for a job, you took and delivered her bankbook, ATM card, and PIN to others without her knowledge, which is inconsistent with what you stated today. What are your comments?"
Mr. Sun: "My wife knew. Because I told her before going to meet the other party that day"

The prosecutor here also used typical leading questions. The question superficially appeared to ask whether the wife knew the husband was using her account to look for a job, but it had already presupposed in the question that "the wife delivered the account to the husband." Another problem was that when the husband answered "Yes," he didn't explicitly clarify whether it was "knowing beforehand" or "knowing afterwards." Later, when the prosecutor questioned Mr. Sun about why his statement differed from Mrs. Sun's, it was only then specifically pinned down as "knowing beforehand." By pinning this down, the prosecutor implicitly questioned whether someone was "lying." And Mr. Sun's response—that Mrs. Sun knew beforehand—was this an exposed truth? A lapse in memory? Or did Mr. Sun say this under questioning just to maintain consistency in his words before the prosecutor? All these possibilities exist, and the root of the problem lies in the "leading questioning" and "exposing lies" techniques taken for granted by police and prosecutors.

Although Mrs. Sun was acquitted in the first instance, after the prosecutor appealed to the second instance, the judge changed the verdict to guilty, sentencing her to 4 months of imprisonment, commutable to a fine of NT$1,000 per day. The key to the overturned verdict was that Mr. and Mrs. Sun had given inconsistent statements in previous questioning processes, leading the judge to conclude that both were lying and that Mrs. Sun must have colluded with the scam syndicate. But the contradiction is that the scam syndicate in this case had actually been targeted by the police for a long time, and their phone calls were wiretapped. Among them, the conversation recording of Mr. Sun being deceived was captured, yet there was not a single conversation recording showing collusion between the Sun couple and the scam syndicate...

When Will the Nightmare End...?

After Mrs. Sun received the guilty verdict, Mr. Sun could not bear the thought of his then-pregnant wife serving time in prison, so he decided to pay the NT$120,000 fine. However, the family's financial pressure was already heavy, forcing Mr. Sun to borrow high-interest loans from underground loan sharks, receiving threatening calls in the middle of the night. Fortunately, Mr. Sun's boss valued him greatly and helped him pay off the high-interest loan first, allowing the Sun couple to escape the predicament. Nevertheless, because of the lawsuit, Mrs. Sun was unable to use her bank account for a long time, income from work could not be deposited into the account, and she was burdened with a criminal record for aiding and abetting fraud. When looking for a job, she would always struggle in her heart over whether to tell the other party that she had a criminal record, while constantly worrying about how the other party would view her.

Due to the judiciary's habitual reliance on leading questions, the Sun couple fell into a trap, unsure of when the nightmare would end. And if the judiciary continues to unreflectively employ these "truth-uncovering" techniques to frame people, for innocent citizens, the nightmare of the judicial system will never come to an end.