Lu Chun-kuan Case

Case Summary

On January 23, 2017, the court found that Lu Chun-kuan had reached a bribery agreement with operators illegally running gambling arcades. The operators' motive for bribing him was that the gambling arcade involved was located in the criminal-jurisdiction beat for which Lu was responsible; to avoid crackdowns, the operators surnamed Li and Hsieh paid bribes through Su Wen-sheng, who had known Lu for many years. Hsieh, Li, and Su all stated that the purpose of bribing Lu was to avoid enforcement against the gambling arcade's violations. However, the only basis for conviction in the final judgment was the confessions of these three men; other evidence capable of proving that Lu actually took bribes was needed to reinforce the credibility of those confessions. The court therefore used a desk calendar handwritten by Li as corroborating evidence for the three confessions, treating the words "Jenwu Investigation Team, Kuan-tsai" written on the calendar as Li's record made after bribing Lu, to support the finding that Lu had indeed taken bribes. In the end, Lu was found to have accepted bribes totaling NT$300,000 and was given a heavy sentence of 13 years of imprisonment with deprivation of civil rights for 6 years.

Doubts

The court hearing this case relied on no direct, objective evidence to prove that Lu Chun-kuan actually committed bribery, resting the conviction solely on the testimony of tainted witnesses. Even the corroborating evidence used to reinforce the credibility of the confessions was a tainted witness's handwritten desk calendar — a private document written by Li that, at its core, lacks objectivity. In addition, the tainted witnesses' testimony was inconsistent and even showed signs of prosecutorial leading, making the evidentiary structure of this case all the more fragile.

Doubt 1: The contradictory testimony of Li and Su Wen-sheng

Li once explained why he asked Su Wen-sheng to help bribe Lu Chun-kuan: an employee told him that Lu had left business cards at the arcade, so he asked Su whether he knew Lu. Yet in the trial transcript of October 17, 2016, Li claimed that he had known Su and Lu were on good terms well before Lu left the business cards, and that only when Lu came to leave the cards did he ask Su to help pay bribes. Li's account of how he came to use Su as a middleman contradicts his earlier statements.

Lu has consistently denied leaving any business cards, and no business card was ever found in searches. Yet Li also said it was an employee who copied down Lu's name and told him — a version far removed from his original confession that the bribery was based on the business card.

Whether Su actually delivered the bribe money to Lu is also disputed. Apart from the absence of any money-flow records proving Lu took bribes, Su claimed at his first interrogation on November 24, 2015 that he had pocketed the bribe money Li entrusted to him for delivery to Lu; on December 5 of the same year he still denied giving money to Lu; only on December 8 did Su change his story and admit to bribing Lu. The final judgment explained Su's inconsistent testimony on the ground that "the witness changed his testimony only after the desk calendar was searched and seized" — but the calendar had already been seized on October 20 of that year, so the final judgment's explanation is not reasonable.

Doubt 2: Improper interrogation and leading of Hsieh by the prosecution

In discussions between the prosecutor and Hsieh's retained lawyer, the prosecutor made plain that because another police officer had temporarily taken over Lu's beat between his earlier and later postings, and that officer had taken bribes, the prosecutor directly assumed Lu must have accepted the same pattern of bribes. Such reasoning already violates the presumption of innocence.

When the lawyer relayed the prosecutor's account to Hsieh, and throughout the subsequent interrogations, Hsieh clearly could not answer who "Kuan-tsai" was or what his real name might be. When the prosecutor asked how he knew that the other officer and "Kuan-tsai" were predecessor and successor, Hsieh's answer was astonishingly: "Because the lawyer just told me." Only later did he change his account, saying that too much time had passed and he vaguely recalled Li mentioning it. It is plain that Hsieh simply hoped that cooperating with the prosecution's account would earn him the benefit of deferred prosecution; such testimony obviously does not accord with the facts and proves nothing.

Doubt 3: Corroborating evidence lacking objectivity

As the judgment shows, the final judgment used the desk calendar handwritten by Li as the basis for reinforcing the confessions. On the calendar's admissibility, the final judgment invoked the hearsay rule, reasoning that Li did not make the entries with a view to their later use as criminal evidence, so he would have had no motive to record anything false, and that it would be difficult for Li to orally restate in court the facts recorded in the calendar; it therefore held the calendar met the hearsay-rule requirements of a "document of special credibility" and could be admitted as evidence.

But doubts about the calendar's credibility and authenticity are riddled with holes. According to Li's initial account, the calendar entries were written casually without chronological order; he later changed this to say they were records made as matters progressed. These inconsistent statements already sharply diminish the calendar's credibility. Moreover, the pages for July 23 and August 27, 2012 bear the writing "Kuan-tsai," yet Li affirmed in the trial transcript that the first bribe to Lu, as the final judgment posited, began in November 2012. Seen from this, Li's confession diverges substantially from what he himself wrote in the calendar, and the calendar cannot be seen to corroborate the confession at all.

Doubt 4: Lu presented an alibi, which the final judgment rejected without careful investigation

The final judgment found that call records between Su and Lu on June 25, June 26, July 22, August 25, September 19, and September 22, 2015 existed because Su needed to deliver to Lu the bribes entrusted by Li on the 20th of each month and phoned Lu to arrange meetings. But the two men also had call records on June 14, 15, and 16, and July 1, 9, and 18 of the same year — the judgment cherry-picked only the dates unfavorable to Lu as the basis for bribery, an excessively one-sided approach. Another ground on which Lu asserts his innocence: for September 19 and September 22, Lu cited the Jenwu Precinct duty roster showing he was on duty those days and could not possibly have met Su to collect bribes while on duty.

Furthermore, on August 25, September 18, and September 22 of that year, the cell-tower locations of Su and Lu were in different districts — and based on those cell-tower locations, it can further be confirmed that Lu did not take bribes. The court should have investigated such crucial evidence thoroughly, yet the final judgment rebutted Lu's alibi merely on the ground that it is "common knowledge" that travel between the three administrative districts shown by the cell towers takes less than 30 minutes. The final judgment ignored that driving time can be affected by many factors, and its hasty finding that "travel takes only half an hour, so there was no obstacle to Su meeting Lu" remains disputable in practical terms.