Court Observation | The Su Case Unfinished: Summoning Review Expert Prof. Li Chun-I Regarding Henry Lee's Crime Scene Reconstruction Appraisal Report

Reason for the Hearing:

In 1991, without any direct evidence, Su Chien-ho, Liu Bing-lang, and Chuang Lin-xun were accused of involvement in the murder of the Wu couple in Hsichih Town, Taipei County. After a trial process lasting approximately 21 years, the three were finally found not guilty on August 31, 2012, in the third retrial.

It was thought that the Su Chien-ho case had come to an end; however, a criminal incidental civil compensation lawsuit filed by the victims' families in 1992 continued to be heard by the civil court after the criminal case was finalized. Both the first and second instances ruled that the three defendants bore no liability for damages (Case Numbers: Taiwan Shihlin District Court Civil Judgment 81-Chung-Su-101, Taiwan High Court Civil Judgment 103-Chung-Shang-719).

On August 26, 2020, the Supreme Court revoked the judgment and remanded the case back to the High Court. Thus, entering its 30th year, the Su Chien-ho case remains unfinished...

Among the reasons for remand, it was stated that "whether Henry Lee's crime scene reconstruction appraisal report holds greater probative value than the appraisal report of the Institute of Forensic Medicine" requires further deliberation. The previous hearing (March 4, 2022) also noted that the Institute of Forensic Medicine's appraisal report—one of the key pieces of evidence previously deemed to establish guilt—had undergone a review appraisal by the Central Police University, and shaking its validity would require more evidence.

Therefore, today (April 15), addressing the issues in Dr. Henry Lee's appraisal report from back then, the court summoned Prof. Li Chun-I (Professor at the Graduate Institute of Forensic Medicine, National Taiwan University College of Medicine), whom the defense requested to serve as the review expert, to appear in court.

Proceedings:

I. An Unexpected Interlude

Right at the start of the hearing, quite a commotion arose because the appellant's lawyer wished to appoint another senior lawyer, A, as a sub-agent. However, the appellee's legal team questioned why, if senior lawyer A was a practicing lawyer themselves, they were not appearing in the capacity of a litigation agent. Furthermore, since the appellant's own litigation agent was a lawyer and could attend to perform duties that day, why appoint senior lawyer A as a sub-agent? Upon further inquiry, it was discovered that lawyer A had no registration record in the Ministry of Justice's attorney inquiry system. Ultimately, the judge rejected the request on the grounds of a lack of special necessary cause, even remarking somewhat displeasedly whether the appellant's lawyer was unfamiliar with the existing provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure...

II. Questioning by the Judge and the Appellee's Lawyer

From the initial inquiries regarding professional background, it was established that Professor Li Chun-I's background involves teaching courses related to forensic biology, firearms and DNA identification, and crime scene investigation, alongside relevant practical forensics experience, demonstrating professional competency in appraisal.

Moving on to the discussion of the appraisal report, the Professor stated that the appraisal method used by the Institute of Forensic Medicine involved working backward from the knife mark angles on the body to deduce the type of weapon. However, based on his own research and relevant literature, due to the influence of bone material (hardness, thickness, etc.), striking angle, and force, different knives can produce the same knife mark angle, and the same knife can produce different knife mark angles. Thus, the appraisal lacks reliability.

Even ten years after this appraisal report was submitted, the Institute of Forensic Medicine published an article internationally rejecting this research methodology of deducing weapon types from knife mark angles. The Professor noted that from this, it is evident that the Institute of Forensic Medicine's original appraisal was submitted without even conducting a validation test—a test to determine whether the method used could appraise the matters to be proven—making it akin to blind men feeling an elephant: mistaking a certain characteristic for a certain phenomenon.

The Professor further mentioned that (even assuming the aforementioned method were deemed feasible) the Institute of Forensic Medicine claimed in its appraisal to compare angles using knife wounds of the same depth. Yet, photographs from the research reveal that the depths of the compared wounds were actually inconsistent, failing to match their presupposed appraisal conditions. Therefore, the execution of the research itself contained a certain degree of flaw and lacked rationality.

In contrast, the Professor expressed the view that Dr. Henry Lee's crime scene reconstruction appraisal report was not only adopted and accepted within appraisal circles in terms of methodology, but its content also matched the physical evidence obtained in the case, making it overall much more consistent with scientific principles and empirical rules.

III. Questioning by the Appellant's Lawyer

When it came to the questioning by the appellant's lawyer, they began by asking whether the Professor had met and communicated with the JRF and the appellee's legal team prior to today's hearing. This seemed intended to verify the Professor's impartiality and appeared somewhat reasonable at first, but in the process, the lawyer aggressively questioned whether they hadn't even exchanged greetings, thereby steering the question toward a direction lacking practical significance (as common sense suggests one would not link a greeting to impartiality).

Subsequently, the lawyer asked whether the Professor had ever been commissioned by a court to perform appraisal work related to knife marks, seemingly wanting to more precisely confirm the Professor's expertise in this area. However, the questioning was challenged by the judge for flawed logical reasoning and incorrect presuppositions; for instance, under regulations, court-commissioned appraisals are conducted through institutional appraisal, and individuals are never commissioned personally.

Midway through, the lawyer attempted to simply present physical evidence photographs (wounds on the body) and demand that the Professor determine the murder weapon directly with the naked eye, prompting the judge to remark: if such professional problems could be accurately resolved just by looking at them, we wouldn't have been in litigation for so many years over this...

Finally, the lawyer wanted to present other physical evidence to question the Professor, but committed continuous errors: not only repeatedly attempting to hand their mobile phone directly to the expert in violation of procedural rules, but also continually misquoting physical evidence numbers and related arguments, causing the judge and opposing counsel to raise endless questions regarding their inquiries.

Post-Hearing Whispers:

Although I have dabbled in the legal field for some time, this was the author's first time entering a courtroom for observation. Having long known that practical settings would not feature the dramatic back-and-forth defenses seen in television dramas, the author had hoped to witness the difficulty of choosing between competing values in hard cases—as described by American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin—yet only witnessed the rigorlessness and unprofessionalism of the appellant's lawyer.

During the hearing, the audience filled with spectators would occasionally emit quiet chuckles due to the aforementioned blunders of the appellant's lawyer. At first, the author also found it somewhat amusing, akin to the giggles of students over a botched class report. But as it went on, the author could no longer laugh at all and almost shed tears, gradually sinking into a profound chill: first, unable to understand why a lawyer, acting as a professional, could treat a real individual case with such rigorlessness, arguably performing even worse than a general college student's class presentation; second, unable to understand why, amid such rigorlessness, one must be entangled in litigation for nearly 30 years (even previously as a criminal case).

A single observational experience surely cannot and should not generalize and interpret all professional roles within the judicial field; yet when the exercise of expertise no longer affects grades in a classroom, but instead impacts real, living human experiences, perhaps we must reflect: what manner of human interactive relationship is it that we truly hope for and pursue.

May every human experience find its own expansiveness...