What the Ch'en Ching-k'ai Case Has Taught Us

Ch'en Ching-k'ai is a young man who lost his eyesight a decade ago due to a major traffic accident. After working hard to rebuild his life following the accident, he was subsequently prosecuted by a prosecutor for fraud, and major insurance companies also sought to recover insurance payouts from him on the grounds of 'faking blindness.' Consequently, this victim began running tirelessly back and forth to major medical institutions to repeatedly undergo various precision tests, all just to prove that he was 'truly blind.'

Visual Acuity Does Not Equal Athletic Performance

Yet all the medical diagnoses and scientific appraisals favorable to him ultimately failed to withstand a video of his daily activities secretly recorded by the perpetrator of the traffic accident, leading to his conviction by the court. After all, in the video, he could run, jump, play ball, and dance; who would truly believe he was 'blind'?

In the field of special education, there is an important academic concept: 'functional vision assessment.' It discusses how human visual acuity refers to data obtained through visual acuity charts and instrument testing, such as a decimal visual acuity of 1.0 or 0.1. However, visual acuity values cannot fully represent a subject's actual application in daily life. What the actual application of vision entails must be evaluated comprehensively by integrating other sensory uses, such as proprioception, hearing, and smell—this is known as 'functional vision assessment.' Furthermore, the actual life performance of a visually impaired person is also influenced by their acquired life experience, degree of rehabilitation, and athletic skills.

Therefore, two individuals with the same decimal visual acuity of 0.1 will not have identical athletic performance; similarly, an individual with a decimal visual acuity of 0.01 (commonly known as 'blindness'), through their previously cultivated superior athletic abilities, hard-earned rehabilitation, and effective strategy utilization, may not necessarily perform worse in athletics than someone with severe myopia whose vision has not been corrected. 'Blindness' does not mean 'disability.' Without this level of awareness, we may forever harbor prejudices against visually impaired people, thereby resulting in judicial trial errors.

For example, in a secretly recorded group dance video, ordinary people would only see Ch'en Ching-k'ai—among a group dance performance of dozens of people—walking through formations, moving forward, high-fiving other performers, and engaging in other physical interactions without any abnormalities, making it hard to believe he was 'blind.' Little do they know, however, that the video actually contains many subtle yet crucial details such as other performers 'turning their heads to remind him,' 'touching him with their elbows,' and 'actively stepping forward to high-five.' In other words, many formations and movements were completed through the assistance of others.

For another example, a video showed Ch'en Ching-k'ai engaged in a table tennis rally practice with a student, with the ball lacking any special design, which seems utterly baffling to the perception of ordinary people. Little do they know, however, that the key detail revealed in the video is that Ch'en Ching-k'ai maintained a certain distance from the table, forcing the student on the opposite side to slow down the ball's return speed and widen the ball's bounce amplitude, thereby buying reaction time to catch the color block and sound of the ball, before returning it with a scooping motion from bottom to top.

Allowing Sighted People to See the World of the Blind

To Ch'en Ching-k'ai, who was an exceptional athlete before losing his sight, such movements appeared clumsy and unprofessional, yet they constituted an important strategic application in his self-rehabilitation. Moreover, the table tennis ball was yellow, which—for Ch'en Ching-k'ai as a patient with cortical visual impairment (CVI)—happened to be a color he had a visual preference for.

What seems unbelievable in the eyes of ordinary people is actually just the result of a person with physical or mental disabilities utilizing effective strategies and undergoing post-accident life reconstruction. It is precisely due to cognitive biases against the visually impaired that the exact same video—which, in the eyes of special education professionals, simply illustrates how a visually impaired person rebuilds their athletic performance through strategic methods—was instead used in reverse by the adjudicators as evidence to infer 'faked blindness,' and even to overturn the series of precise medical and scientific test results Ch'en Ching-k'ai underwent, including visual evoked potentials, electroretinography, electroencephalography, and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The Ch'en Ching-k'ai case sits at the intersection of three professional fields: law, medicine, and special education. The civil retrial judgment rendered by the Taiwan High Court Kaohsiung Branch Court on the 27th, which overturned the original final judgment and dismissed the claims of MSIG Insurance Taiwan, undoubtedly demonstrates the judiciary's capacity for self-correction and deserves affirmation. However, the deeper significance of the Ch'en Ching-k'ai case lies in guiding us 'sighted people' to truly see the world of the blind that was originally obscured by prejudice; only through empathetic understanding can we prevent the next tragedy from happening.

※ This article was published in Apple Daily on August 27, 2020