【August 13, 2010, Taiwan High Court Criminal Building, photographed by the HEF.】

When the Innocent Become Victims: How Police Culture Judges the Innocent

On November 12, 2010, the autumn sun illuminated the Taiwan High Court, but my heart burned with the intensity of summer. Earlier that day, the Hsichih Trio case saw its second retrial, and Su Chien-ho, Liu Bin-lang, and Chuang Lin-hsun were finally acquitted! After enduring nearly two decades of relentless legal battles, a glimmer of hope emerged from the darkness of this wrongful conviction.

My reflection on the verdict, “What We Learn from the Hsichih Trio Case?” was published in the China Times on November 13 and later in the Taipei Times as “Police Culture Judges the Innocent.” Revisiting these articles in 2024, the cries for justice from the wrongfully accused and their families still resonate deeply within me.

This arduous journey exposed countless injustices, solidifying my conviction that those wrongfully accused are not merely suspects but victims of crime. They suffer the agony of lost freedom and the profound disillusionment with humanity and society. Though Su Chien-ho and the others still faced a long road to complete exoneration, I held firm to the belief that the relentless pursuit of truth would eventually lead to justice. The wrongfully accused also deserve recognition as crime victims, entitled to the protection and support of the state.

Updated on 2024/7/27
(Note: While the Hsichih Trio were ultimately exonerated in the third retrial on August 31, 2012, the civil lawsuit filed by the victim’s family against the defendants has dragged on for another twelve years and remains unresolved.)

Following article was published in Taipei Times on Nov 18, 2010.

Police culture judges the innocent

On Friday last week, the Taiwan High Court found the three defendants in the Hsichih Trio murder case — Su Chien-ho (蘇建和), Liu Bin-lang (劉秉郎) and Chuang Lin-hsun (莊林勳) — not guilty on the strength of the conclusion of a crime scene reconstruction assessment by US forensic scientist Henry Lee (李昌鈺). For these three men, this represents justice a long time in the making. The strain of 20 years of litigation for this case has also made itself felt on Taiwanese society. But how did we get into this mess in the first place? If there is a better example out there of embarking on a string of errors after having failed to correct an initial misjudgment, I certainly am not aware of it. 

On March 24, 1991, Wu Min-han (吳銘漢) and his wife, Yeh Ying-lan (葉盈蘭), were murdered in their home in Sijhih (汐止), Taipei County. A report from the Sijhih precinct responsible for the investigation specified signs of a struggle at the crime scene consistent with more than one perpetrator, saying that the police had collected a number of suspicious fingerprints that they had submitted to the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB). According to a Chinese-language newspaper report the following day, the police were working on the hypothesis that there had been more than one perpetrator.

After five months searching for matching fingerprints, conscript Wang Wen-hsiao (王文孝) was arrested on Aug. 14. The police announced that they were still looking for Wang’s accomplices, as his fingerprints were just one set among several found at the crime scene. Two days after his arrest, police said they had extracted the -identities of the alleged accomplices from Wang, leading to the arrest of three other men. The police then pronounced the case closed. In October of that same year, prosecutors charged Su, Liu and Chuang.

The defense lawyer appointed for the three men, Su Yiu-chen (蘇友辰), on reading the indictment in court, discovered that, with the exception of the individual confessions, there was nothing by way of evidence supporting the police’s case. There wasn’t any sign of the fingerprint results that had led to the original indictment. In his initial argument on Oct. 2, Su Yiu-chen said that police had revealed that they had found four different fingerprints at the scene of the crime, including one containing traces of blood that had incriminated Wang. There were no further details concerning the other fingerprints. If the other fingerprints also had traces of blood on them and they did not belong to the defendants, Wang clearly had accomplices other than those he had implicated. The lawyer then requested that the police account for where the other four fingerprints they claimed to have found had gone.

The Shilin District Court requested, on several occasions, access to the police files detailing Wang’s fingerprints. In an attempt to confirm whether other fingerprints actually existed, the judge issued two subpoenas calling the police to account, but they simply maintained that there were several fingerprints found at the scene, but they could not be produced at the time. The police also embellished the facts of the case, insisting that more than one person had been involved. In the end, the collegiate bench of the court of first instance took the police on their word and delivered a guilty verdict, handing down the death sentence to the three defendants. The evidence listed on the verdict was the written appraisal of Wang’s fingerprints, a truncheon, a small purse (containing a bunch of keys) and stolen money amounting to NT$24.

After the appeal, the defendants and their lawyers continued to press for the whereabouts of the other fingerprints. Finally, on July 1, 1992, the Sijhih precinct conceded to the High Court that the other three fingerprints found on the crime scene had also belonged to Wang. As it turned out, there never were four different fingerprints, and the claim that there had been four people involved in the case was simply an assumption on the part of the police. It was this initial assessment that made the police doubt the veracity of Wang’s confession that he had been alone that night. They beat a further confession out of him, he named names and three innocent men were suddenly implicated in the murder.

The errors did not end there. After 10 years of retrials, the courts had confirmed that the truncheon, the purse and the small change had nothing to do with the three defendants, that they were all planted by the police. The initial mistake over the four different fingerprints may well have been the result of human error during the initial forensic assessment, but the subsequent falsification and planting and suppression of evidence were all clearly irregularities committed by police at the Sijhih precinct to conceal both the fact that they had extracted information under torture and their own litany of errors that followed. If they hadn’t managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the prosecutors and the judges, Su Chien-ho, Liu and Chang would not have been dragged through the courts for two decades.

Taiwan is a civilized society based on the rule of law, so how is it that the system still allows miscarriages of justice, and the law is trampled by law enforcers preoccupied solely with closing cases? Now that the Hsichih Trio case has finally been put to rest after 20 years of litigation, the most pressing issue for society to face up to is how we can end the police culture of seeking to close cases irrespective of whether the true perpetrators are caught.

By Hsiao I-Min (蕭逸民), he is the secretary for the Hsichih Trio case in the Humanistic Education Foundation.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER