Mid-Autumn Festival with "Them": Advocacy for People Seeking Relief from Wrongful Convictions

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a time for families to reunite.

But some people are still waiting for justice delayed. Confronted with injustice in the legal system, they are spending yet another Mid-Autumn Festival unable to go home.

Wang Hsin-Fu is currently Taiwan's oldest death-row prisoner. Prosecutors accused him of involvement in multiple murders, and the court sentenced him to death despite serious concerns about his procedural rights, relying on an untested confession and evidence riddled with doubt. Having exhausted the available judicial remedies, Wang Hsin-Fu is still waiting for the day his innocence can finally be recognized.

Chiu Ho-Shun is a Taiwanese death-row prisoner whose case has drawn international attention. An unfair trial has kept him imprisoned for more than ten thousand days. Thirty-three years later, Chiu Ho-Shun remains confined at the Taipei Detention Center, living under the possibility of execution.

Chiu Sung-Chengwas convicted of murder even though he maintains that he never held a knife. What began as an ordinary debt negotiation ended with two deaths, and the court ultimately found that Chiu Sung-Cheng had carried out a fatal stabbing.

Hsiao Ming-Yueh became entangled in an international drug-trafficking case. The court relied principally on statements by other co-defendants to identify him as the organizer of the trafficking operation and ultimately sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Lo Ming-Tsun was a police officer who, after a shooting, was found by the court to have accepted a NT$500,000 bribe from organized-crime figures to protect the actual shooter. Yet the proceedings contain serious disputed issues: the prosecutor filed an appeal after the statutory deadline, and on the second remand the court relied on multiple pieces of evidence whose reliability has been questioned.