Capital punishment in Taiwan

The Criminal Law of the Armed Forces rules that the following crimes are eligible for the death penalty when committed by military personnel:[4]

• Treason (Article 14, 15)
• Collaboration (Article 17, 18)
• Espionage (Article 19, 20)
• Defection (Article 24)
• Malfeasance (Article 26, 27)
• Disclosure of intelligence or secrets (Article 31)
• Desertion only during war time (Article 41, 42)
• Disobeying orders (Article 47, 48)
• Mutiny (Article 49, 50)
• Hijacking (Article 53)
• Destroying military supplies and equipment (Article 58)
• Stealing and selling ammunition (Article 65)
• Fabricating orders (Article 66)

The Criminal Code of the Republic of China rules that the following civilian offenses are eligible for the death penalty:[5]

• Civil disturbance as ringleader (Article 101)
• Treason (Article 103, 104, 105, 107)
• Abandoning territory in charge (Article 120)
• Hijacking (Article 185–1, 185–2)
• Sexual Offenses with murder (Article 226–1)
• Civil servant forcing others to cultivate, sell or transport poppy plants to manufacture opium or morphine (Article 261)
• Murder (Article 271, 272)
• Robbery with homicide, severe injury, rape, kidnapping or arson (Article 328, 332)
• Piracy (Article 333, 334)
• Kidnapping with homicide, severe injury or rape (Article 347, 348)

Article 63 of the Criminal Code also rules that the death penalty cannot be imposed for offenders aged below 18 or above 80. The death penalty is not prescribed as a mandatory punishment in any case and is only imposed with the discretion of the sentencing court. [6]

Other special laws which define capital offenses include:

• Civil Aviation Act [7]
  • Hijacking
  • Endangering flight safety or aviation facilities by force and causing death
  • Using unapproved aviation products, appliances, and parts to cause death
• Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act [8]
  • Manufacturing, transporting or selling Category One narcotics (Heroin, Morphine, Opium, Cocaine and their derivative products) [9]
  • Compelling others to use Category One narcotics by means of violence, coercion, deception or other illegal methods
  • Civil servant manufacturing, transporting or selling Category Two narcotics (Opium poppy, Coca, Cannabis, Amphetamines, Pethidine, Pentazocine, and their derivative products)[10]
• Punishment Act for Violation to Military Service System [11]
  • Carrying weapons by group, obstructing a military service and causing death
  • Carrying weapons by group, fighting publicly against a military service and
    • Causing death or
    • Being the ringleader.
• Child and Youth Sexual Transaction Prevention Act [12]
  • Committing and purposely killing the victim of
    • Making a person under 18 engage in a sexual transaction by violence, menace, medicament, control, hypnogenesis, or other ways against the will of himself/herself
    • Intending to making a person under 18 engage in a sexual transaction, and to deliver or accept him/her to or from another person by dealing, impawning or other ways and by violence, menace, medicament, control, hypnogenesis or other ways against the will of himself/herself
• Punishment Act for Genocide [13]
  • Intending to commit genocide and committing any of the following:
    • Murder
    • Serious injury, physically or mentally
    • Fertility impairment
    • Child abduction
    • Other ways sufficient to eliminate the group
• Controlling Guns, Ammunition and Knives Act [14]
  • Manufacturing, selling or transporting cannons, shoulder arms, machine guns, submachine guns, carbines, automatic rifles, rifles, traditional carbines, pistols, or any types of artillery shells, bombs and explosives without approval with an intention to commit a crime by himself/herself or assist others to commit a crime
• Act for the Control and Punishment of Smuggling [15]
  • Smuggling, resisting arrest or inspection with a weapon and causing death

In practice, all death sentences and executions since 2003 have been imposed for murder-related offences. The last non-homicide-related execution in Taiwan took place in October 2002, in the case of a Pingtung County fisherman who was accused of trafficking 295 kg of heroin in 1993.[16]

Two laws, now invalid, have historically contributed to a significant number of executions in Taiwan:

• Betrayers Punishment Act (zh:懲治叛亂條例, repealed in May 1991[17]), which imposed a mandatory death sentence for cases of treason, espionage, and defection. The law was enacted in 1949 when the Central Government had just retreated to Taiwan, and was applicable to both military and common courts, playing an important role during the White Terror. Information about people sentenced according to this law was historically restricted because of their legal status as court-martials. Two high-profile cases, that of Bo Yang and Shih Ming-teh, involved an initial death sentence under this law that was eventually commuted to life imprisonment due to heavy political pressure that surrounded their trials.
• Robbery Punishment Act (zh:懲治盜匪條例, repealed in January 2002[18]), which ruled a mandatory death penalty for cases of kidnapping, piracy or robbery along with murder, rape, and arson. Originally enacted as a short-term special law by the Kuomintang government during the Second Sino-Japanese War period, this law was eventually extended indefinitely for security reasons.

The death penalty in Taiwan under Japanese rule period was carried out by hanging. [30] [31]

There are accounts of organs being removed from executed prisoners while they were not yet clinically dead.[35]

The Death Penalty Procedural Rules of Taiwan used to state that inmates who have agreed to donate their organs are shot in the head. Twenty minutes after the execution, an examination is conducted to verify the death of the condemned person. The bodies of donors are sent to hospitals for organ collection after completion of the execution is confirmed. In 2012, The Ministry of Justice announced that they would no longer approve any requests from death row inmates to donate organs;[36] Then in 2020, all relevant statutes were invalidated.[37][38][39]

According to the Human Organ Transplantation Act of Taiwan, an organ donor can only donate after being judged brain-dead by a medical doctor. When a ventilator is in use, there must be an observation period of 12 hours for the first evaluation and a four-hour period for the second evaluation to reach a judgment of brain death.

In Taiwan, there have been cases of bodies being sent to hospitals for organ collection without legal confirmation of brain death, leading to accusations that human vivisection for organ collection and transplantation is in practice in Taiwan. In one case in 1991 a prospective donor was found to be still breathing unaided when being prepared for organ collection in the Taipei Veterans General Hospital. The person was sent back to the execution ground to complete the execution. This case caused the Taipei Veterans General Hospital to refuse organ collection of executed inmates for eight years.[40]

In March 1991, a Hsichih couple, Wu Ming-han and Yeh Ying-lan, were found robbed and murdered inside their apartment. In August 1991 police arrested their neighbor Wang Wen-hsiao, then serving in the ROC Marine Corps, based on Wang's bloody fingerprint found at the scene. He confessed to the murder after investigators discovered evidence of him breaking in and entering the house, but police doubted he could have killed two adults so easily and brutally without help. Under torture, Wang confessed to help from three accomplices who lived in the same community—Su Chien-ho, Chuang Lin-hsun and Liu Bin-lang.[41] These four young men further confessed that they gang raped Yeh Ying-lan during their break-in, but the autopsy of Yeh's body showed no traces of sexual assault.[42]

Wang Wen-hsiao was court-martialed and speedily executed in January 1992. The other three defendants were prosecuted under the Act for the Control and Punishment of Banditry, which stipulated compulsory death sentences for their crimes if found guilty. During their trial, the defendants repeatedly claimed they were forced to make false confessions under torture and were not guilty, but the judges did not believe them.

In February 1995, the Supreme Court of the Republic of China found against the defendants. According to the procedure, the three should then have been executed by shooting as soon as possible, but Minister of Justice Ma Ying-jeou refused to sign their death warrants and returned the whole case back to the Supreme Court in hope of a retrial, citing shortcomings such as:

• Only two pieces of evidence were brought against the defendants: Wang Wen-hsiao's confessions and the NT$ 24 dollars (less than $1.00 US) found in Chuang Lin-hsun's home and considered to be booty. The evidence was too weak: Wang Wen-hsiao was executed too early to witness the case and NT$24 was a tiny amount.[43]
• Although all four defendants claimed they were tortured during police interrogation, at which there was no lawyer present, the judges did not investigate this point thoroughly. Wang Wen-hsiao's brother Wang Wen-chung even claimed Hsichih police originally asked his brother to confess as an accomplice, but he had refused.
• There was no evidence that Yeh Ying-lan was raped.

Between 1995 and 2000, Ma Ying-jeou and his three successors filed several retrial requests with the Supreme Court, but all were rejected. Meantime, this case drew the attention of Amnesty International and was widely broadcast throughout the world, nicknamed as "the Hsichih Trio".[44]

The Supreme Court ordered a retrial on May 19, 2000, just one day before former President Chen Shui-bian's inauguration. On January 13, 2003, the Taiwan High Court passed a verdict that they were not guilty and released them, but the victims' families were unwilling to accept this and appealed.[41] On June 29, 2007, the Taiwan High Court once again found the trio guilty and condemned them to death, but surprisingly did not put them in custody[41] because "the 3 defendants are already famous worldwide and will be identified in any place", the first such case in the ROC history. On November 12, 2010, the Taiwan High Court delivered another verdict, revoking the previous decision and finding the three not guilty, "as there was no proof for the crime they were accused of."[45] The prosecutor appealed again, and the Supreme Court ordered yet another retrial on Apr. 21, 2011. On August 31, 2012, the High Court reaffirmed the innocence of the three defendants. According to criminal procedure legislation that came into effect in 2010, when court proceedings have begun on a criminal case more than six years previously, and the Supreme Court had ordered more than three retrials, if the High Court has already found the defendants to be not guilty twice and decided not guilty again in the third trial, the prosecutor may no longer appeal.[46] The High Court delivered the first not guilty verdict in 2003, and again in 2010. With the 2012 verdict, the Hsichih trio meets the condition of the new criminal legislation, and the case is concluded.[47]

In December 1997, Tainan native Lu Cheng, an unemployed former policeman, was charged with the kidnapping and murder of a local woman, Chan Chun-tzu, who along with her husband were both former high school classmates of Lu's. The Supreme Court of the Republic of China sentenced Lu to death in June 2000 but his family noted several suspicious points:[48]

• As with the Hsichih Trio, Lu Cheng had been tortured by police and was forced into making a confession.
• The judges intentionally ignored his alibi that he had been with his young niece at the time of the murder.
• The kidnapper phoned the victim's husband during the crime. If Lu Cheng had committed the kidnapping, the victim's husband should have been able to identify his voice.
• The verdict stated that Lu Cheng had used his shoelaces to strangle the victim. However, the autopsy showed the victim's strangulation burns did not match Lu's shoelaces.

Despite these suspicious points, the Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan ordered Lu Cheng's execution on September 7, 2000, just one day before that year's Mid-Autumn Festival. There were rumours that Lu Cheng remained conscious after receiving five anaesthetic injections at 3:00 a.m., so the officials had to shoot him while he was conscious and his eyes remained open after his death. Lu Cheng's family continues to protest but there has been no concrete official response to date.

President Ma Ying-jeou and the Ministry of National Defense have made a public apology to the family of former Air Force Pvt. Chiang Kuo-ching for his wrongful execution in 1997.[49] Chiang was arrested for the September 12, 1996, rape and murder of a five-year-old girl known only by the surname of Hsieh.[50] He was tortured into making a false confession by military counterintelligence.

After reopening the case, investigators arrested Hsu Jung-chou, on 28 January 2011. Hsu then confessed to the crime, thereby posthumously exonerating Chiang. Chiang's family later received NT$103 million (equivalent to US$3.45 million) in compensation for the wrongful execution.[51] In December 2011, Hsu was convicted of the murder of Hsieh and sentenced to 18 years in prison.[50] However, Hsu appealed his conviction. In early April 2013, the Taiwan High Court determined that Hsu was not guilty of the crime after all, and he was released from prison immediately. The court found that Hsu was mentally challenged and could not write, operating on the emotional and intellectual level of a child between the ages of 9 and 12 years old, and that he had made seven confessions that were all contradicted by physical evidence and official autopsy findings. Moreover, his confessions had been written by a member of the military who refused to testify in person during Hsu's rehearing.[50] The Taipei District Prosecutors' Office announced that once they read the ruling, they would determine if it was appropriate to appeal the acquittal to the Supreme Court,[50] but as of August 2020, there have been no further legal developments in the case. The identity of the real murderer remains unknown.

The officials who handled the original investigation that led to Chiang's execution were protected from prosecution by the statute of limitations for public employees.[52] However, many of the officers and civilians who had received awards for presumably solving the case had those awards revoked.[51]

In late 1987, two crimes were committed by a 12-man group led by Chiou Ho-shun. One was the murder of saleswoman Ko Hung Yu-lan, and the other was the kidnapping of schoolboy Lu Cheng. Both of these crimes were related to money and extortion. In September 1988, Chiou Ho-shun and the 11 accomplices were arrested, and Chiou was sentenced to death in 1989.

The case has achieved controversy due to the torture committed by police in order to obtain the confessions. Chiou was reported to be blindfolded, tied up, forced to sit on ice, shocked by electric batons, and made to swallow pepper water during his interrogations, some of which lasted up to 10 hours. In addition, no physical evidence of their crimes have been produced, and all evidence is solely provided by their confessions,[53] many of which had inconsistent details, such as:[54]

• The murder weapons used in the murder of Ko Hung Yu-lan were a rope and three sharp knives. However, a plastic bag found near the body contained a butcher's knife, a rectangular knife, and a veterinary syringe. The bag was later confiscated by the police and disappeared.
• Chiou confessed to taking Ko Hung to a hotel on the day of her death, but there is no record of them staying in a hotel.
• Chiou and others confessed kidnapping Lu Cheng as he was seen coming to school in a luxury car, but Lu's parents testified that he came to school by bus.
• The defendants mentioned eight sites where Lu's corpse was dumped. However, none have contained Lu's body.

After 11 retrials, in 2011 the Supreme Court upheld Chiou's death sentence.[55]

Taiwan's major Buddhist authorities hold diverse interpretations of what can be considered a "Buddhist perspective" to capital punishment:

• Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Order holds that the abolishment of capital punishment "is not necessary", and that it corresponds to the laws of cause and effect in Buddhism.[56]
• Master Sheng Yen, founder of the Dharma Drum Mountain, said: "Now, should capital punishment be abolished? As a Dharma master, of course I hope it will be abolished". He taught that there are no unchangingly bad people, and all sentient beings can become Buddhas. He argued that abolishing capital punishment should take two paths: legally decrease the number of death sentences, and promote religious education so as to prevent crime.[57]
• Tzu Chi Buddhist Master and Hsuan Chuang University College of Social Sciences Dean Shih Chao-hui has written:

...the Buddha has stated very clearly that 'no killing' is the first rule of the five basic moral ethics (the Five Precepts). It is absolutely impossible for Buddha to speak favorably of 'solving problems through killing'. Killings will only lead to more killings. It is not necessary for the victims and their family members to take revenge personally, and no third parties are needed to join into the network of killing. Their own karma will not let them run away.[58]