Book Launch: "Waiting in 1.368 Pings: Hsu Tzu-chiang's Path to Acquittal"

During the authoritarian rule, the judiciary was an instrument of suppression for the party-state—an uncomfortable truth that legal professionals still dare not face today. In those years, extracting confessions through torture followed by sweeping arrests of associates, implicating countless individuals, was treated as a self-evident rationale under the suppression mindset of eradicating evils completely.

The hopeless cries from wrongful imprisonments and the suppressed sobs of families in the dark of night were merely minor prices to pay in pursuit of order and security. Hsu Tzu-chiang was falsely accused and convicted by two co-defendants, nearly losing his life at the execution ground; this was the quintessential tragedy produced by a judiciary accustomed to suppression. And his tortuous, magnificent process of vindication stands as testimony to the judiciary finally beginning its own redemption.

In the early hours of May 19, 2012, amidst the glimmer of a rainy night, I watched Hsu Tzu-chiang walk out of the detention center; amidst the raindrops, it was hard to tell what was real. Recalling the first time I met Hsu Tzu-chiang, who was of a similar age, in the detention center, his eyes were full of bewilderment. The subsequent attorney visits and court hearings alternated almost entirely between anticipation and despair. When the death sentence was finalized, it felt as though all hope was about to be extinguished; when the case was remanded for retrial via an extraordinary appeal, a glimmer of hope seemed to reappear, but subsequent death and life sentences made everything uncertain again. Between reality and illusion, sixteen years of detention center life had somehow already passed.

Finally, on September 1, 2015, the court changed Hsu Tzu-chiang's verdict to acquittal, and this year we welcomed the good news of the Supreme Court finalizing his acquittal. Looking back, when Hsu Tzu-chiang prepared to surrender himself twenty years ago, he surely could not have imagined that he would experience such a tortuous life and such trials.

The most severe wrongful death penalty case, under the most dire circumstances, catalyzed—through Hsu Tzu-chiang's suffering—the formation of the Taiwan Association for Death Penalty Abolition and Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 582. The former prompted our citizens to begin contemplating the abolition and retention of the death penalty, while the latter ensured that in future cases, a co-defendant's testimony, if not subjected to cross-examination, cannot be used as evidence. Truly, this is like making rivers in the desert and pathways in the wilderness.