Who is the Real Culprit?

The Control Yuan recently released an investigation report issuing a correction to the National Police Agency, the Tainan City Police Department, and its Fifth Precinct. The report concerns a 1997 kidnapping, extortion, and murder case. The investigation report pointed out that the police in this case engaged in improper interrogation, violated the principle of non-publicity of investigation, defrauded the defendant into confessing by promising sentence reductions through surrender, failed to audio and video record the entire process as required by law, made errors in analyzing biological samples such as blood and saliva, and had flaws in the polygraph procedures. Consequently, an official correction was issued.

However, it must be remembered that this defendant, Lu Cheng (盧正), was already executed in the year 2000. Exactly who caused all these lapses is no longer of any importance to him. While we are grateful that members of the Control Yuan were willing to continue tracking and investigating the case even after the party concerned had passed away, this makes it all the more necessary to ask: What is the significance of the investigation? If this investigation report cannot prevent the next tragedy from happening, it seems to completely lose its reason for existing.

The report states that the police used coercion, improper interrogation, and even allowed a "medium" to violate the principle of non-publicity of investigation by "assisting with the interrogation" at the scene. We are not unfamiliar with these tactics. But beyond holding the police accountable, shouldn't we ask whether it was the judges' blind acceptance that encouraged the police to extract confessions through illegal means? Wasn't it because judges relied on confessions as the basis for guilty verdicts that the police dared to brazenly deceive suspects? The report also notes that the police failed to record the entire process as required by law. The police have always shifted blame by citing "insufficient funding and equipment." But to turn the question around, how can statutory requirements written in black and white within the Code of Criminal Procedure be bargained away on the grounds of a lack of funds? Which ordinary citizen can be exempted from withholding taxes simply because they have no money? Laws are meant only for ordinary citizens to obey, while police officers, as law enforcers, are granted exemptions—what kind of logic is that? The report further states that there were problems with the forensic process in this case, spanning from blood and saliva to polygraph procedures. The reality is that the court was able to hand down a sentence of death—a severe punishment—even without a single forensic report pointing to Lu Cheng, and even though the only so-called "physical evidence," a shoelace, bore no blood reactions or fingerprint traces and had even been previously ruled out by the prosecutors. This is the evidentiary standard of our judiciary.

Calls for judicial reform have been resounding in recent years, often leading us to mistakenly believe that today's judiciary is fundamentally different from the past. Yet, looking at this case—an execution carried out less than two years ago, signed off by none other than the current Minister of Justice—our human rights standards have not undergone any major changes with the alternation of political power. The same police officers, prosecutors, and judges are still thinking with old mindsets; the regime is new, but the ideas are old.

As for whether Lu Cheng was truly the murderer in this homicide case, the judiciary failed to find the answer, yet chose to take Lu Cheng's life. This belated investigation report merely tells us that the judiciary failed to find the killer because they made mistakes themselves. Yet, these people who made mistakes may simply receive a demerit or continue to be promoted, while Lu Cheng lost his precious life because of their mistakes; and because of their mistakes, this homicide case can never again hold anyone accountable as the true murderer of the victim.

※ Published in: Taiwan Daily