Originally published by Taiwan Innocence Project.
Taiwan Innocence Project is excited to share a good news that on May 15, 2020, our client, Mr. Hsieh Chih-Hung, who had been sentenced to death in 2011 and spent 18 years behind bars, was exonerated!
Hsieh Chih-Hung was convicted for a double homicide case that took place in 2000. The court was convinced that he and his accomplice, Mr. Kuo, raped and brutally murdered a young woman and also a passerby because he accidentally witnessed the crime scene.
Despite the fact that there was no physical evidence suggesting Hsieh was involved, he was convicted and sentenced to death based on the confessions extracted by coercion, the accomplice’s testimony given by Mr. Kuo, and a forensic report asserting the case must have been done by more than one person.
His conviction was finalized in 2011 and he was then sent into the detention house, waited to be executed. However, he never up fighting for his innocence and reached Taiwan Innocence Project. We took his case in 2013 and discovered errors in the forensic report that could back up his side of the story.
In 2018, advocates persuaded Tainan's High Prosecutors Office to re-investigate and to file a motion for retrial on behalf of Hsieh. This was the second time ever in Taiwan to have the prosecutor file a retrial for a death penalty case（The first one is Mr. Cheng Hsing-Tze, our first client）. On March 13, 2019, Tainan High Court granted the motion, re-opening Hsieh's case for a retrial. The prosecutor immediately released Hsieh.
After a 14-months trial, on May 15, 2020, Tainan High Court gave a not-guilty verdict and confirmed Hsieh's innocence. He had waited 7262 days for this result.
In the new ruling, the court listed three reasons for recanting the original convictions against Mr. Hsieh and for giving not-guilty verdict.
First of all, the court finds that Hsieh's confessions during police interrogations inadmissible because there were no recorded files during the interrogations, which was in breach of the requirement of the Code of Criminal Procedure in Taiwan.
Secondly, the court finds Kuo's credibility is to low to be consider to be true. During the retrial, the co-defendant, Kuo, Chun-Wei, who is still in the death-row, had once again called to the court to testify. He again insisted that Mr. Hsieh had join this crime but the content of his accusations didn’t match with the actual crime scene.
Lastly, after reviewing all the scientific evidence in the case, and after one forensic scientist and two medical-examiners having testified as expert-witnesses, the court finds no physical evidence shows that Hsieh had taken the knife and stabbed the victims.
Hsieh is TIP's second new exoneree in 2020.