TAIWAN: COALITION PETITIONS PRESIDENT TO PARDON DEATH ROW INMATE TORTURED INTO CONFESSION

April 21, 2020:

One week after Taiwan saw its second execution during the tenure of President Tsai Ing-wen, a coalition of NGOs, lawyers, and academics sent her a petition for a presidential pardon for another inmate — Chiou Ho-shun, who over three decades ago was sentenced to death on the basis of confessions extracted through torture during police interrogations, Taiwan News reported on 18 April 2020.
In 1988, police arrested a man in connection with the abduction and disappearance of nine-year-old Lu Cheng. The suspect then named Chiou and 10 others, all of whom initially proclaimed their innocence. But within days, all 12 had admitted not only to murdering the boy in a botched ransom but also to a previously unsolved murder and dismemberment of a woman.
The police continued their interrogations of the suspects until they had secured no less than 288 confessions, which were submitted to the court as evidence, ultimately forming the basis for Chiou's death sentence in 1989.
Chiou later recanted his confessions, which he and his co-defendants said were extracted after numerous, prolonged periods of torture while being held incommunicado.
The abuses were confirmed in the 1994 conviction of two officers involved in the torture sessions. To this day, there exists no physical evidence connecting the accused with the murders.
Nevertheless, the majority of the confessions — the ones that came from interrogations without recorded evidence of physical abuse — continued to be considered in court, even as Taiwan moved beyond its martial law period, carrying out ever fewer death sentences in the early 2000s.
And in each of Chiou's appeals, from his first to his 12th and final in 2011, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence.