Op-Ed | Chiu Ho-Shun's Pro Bono Legal Team: Torture Created an Irresolvable Wrongful Conviction-The President Should Grant a Pardon

The Chiu Ho-Shun case contains some of the clearest documented evidence of torture in Taiwan's judicial history: the police officers responsible were impeached by the Control Yuan, prosecuted, and ultimately convicted. At the same time, substantial evidence points to the innocence of Chiu and the other defendants. The case has therefore become an internationally known wrongful-conviction case. International human-rights experts reviewing Taiwan's implementation of human-rights treaties have repeatedly raised the case and urged the government to provide judicial or other relief.
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After Chiu Ho-Shun's conviction became final in 2011, his pro bono legal team and many supporters pursued every extraordinary remedy available-including retrial, extraordinary appeal, and constitutional review. None has succeeded, and the judiciary remains closed to him.
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The Control Yuan conducted extensive investigations, issued three investigative reports identifying serious problems in the case, and recommended that the Prosecutor-General file an extraordinary appeal. It also used its investigative authority to pursue unresolved factual questions in the hope that, even three decades after the events, new evidence might still emerge that could support a retrial.
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The investigation of the "child's body in the old well" was one such effort. In 1989, while the Chiu Ho-Shun case was being tried, the body of a boy approximately 10 to 12 years old was found in an old well in the Hsinchu area with weights tied to his feet. Contemporary news reports described his age and appearance as similar to Lu Cheng's. Prosecutors, however, neither confirmed the child's identity nor performed an autopsy to determine the cause of death; the body was handled as unidentified and buried.
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Because prosecutors and police never found Lu Cheng's body, the discovery raised an obvious question: could the child in the well have been Lu Cheng? If so, Chiu Ho-Shun and the other defendants-who had already been detained since 1988-could not have committed that killing. Yet prosecutors and courts never resolved the issue before Chiu's conviction became final. The Control Yuan therefore investigated the matter in the hope of identifying evidence capable of reopening the case.
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The Control Yuan ultimately confirmed that the child was not Lu Cheng. That finding corrected one injustice concerning the unidentified child, but it also exposed another reality: more than thirty years after the events, with crucial evidence lost through failures of state custody and preservation, discovering genuinely new evidence sufficient to support retrial has become extraordinarily difficult. A wrongful conviction produced by torture has thus become a judicial dead end. At this point, the President should follow the precedent of another torture-tainted wrongful-conviction case-the Su Ping-Kun case-and pardon Chiu Ho-Shun. #PardonChiuHoShun

Chiu Ho-Shun's Pro Bono Legal Team

Attorney Yu Po-Hsiang
Attorney Lin Chun-Hung
Attorney Lin Hung-Wen
Attorney Tsai Hung-Sheng
Attorney Li Yi-Chuan
Attorney Chou Yu-Hsiu
Attorney Sung Yi-Hsin
Attorney Wei Chao-Tsung
Attorney Cheng Kai-Hung
Attorney Kuo Hao-Jen

※ This article was published on November 5, 2021. ETtoday