Mido's Remarks｜"After Us: Everyday Life Behind Bars" Exhibition Press Conference

One section of this exhibition is titled "Fatal Side Effects," referring to the fatal side effect brought by the death penalty system: wrongful convictions. JRF, alongside partners and volunteers from Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty, Taiwan Association for Human Rights, Amnesty International Taiwan, Taiwan Innocence Project, and Association for Human Education, has invested heavily in rescuing major wrongful conviction cases, successfully exonerating figures such as Su Chien-ho, Hsu Tzu-chiang, Cheng Hsing-tse, and Hsieh Chih-hung...

In our rescue work for death penalty wrongful convictions, we were fortunate to save some people, but we could never save others. For instance, there is the famous wrongful conviction of the "Chiang Kuo-ching case," as well as the Tu brothers. I particularly want to mention Lu Cheng, a death row inmate featured in Part 2 of the documentary *Record of Murder in the Island Nation* directed by director Tsai Tsung-lung. He was executed by firing squad on September 7, 2009, at the Tainan Detention Center, at the age of only 31. This was also one of the cases that JRF had spared no effort to rescue. While reviewing the materials, I saw a forensic doctor describe it this way: "I have never seen a death row inmate executed like this. From the moment he received the notice of execution, he acted as if he had gone mad, shouting his innocence. When given clothes, he refused to wear them, wearing only a pair of underwear, continuously shouting: 'I didn't do it, I'm innocent!' Truly, he came bare and left bare, taking nothing with him." This was not the first case JRF intervened to rescue that ended in execution, but it was the one that dealt the deepest blow (taken from JRF's "Regrets That Came Too Late" https://www.jrf.org.tw/articles/750). This case was also one of the reasons that drove the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty to resolutely press forward.

Today, there are still two death row inmates whom our civil society groups continue to tirelessly rescue without ever giving up. One is Chiou Ho-shun, who has been imprisoned since he was 28 and is now 63; the other is Wang Hsin-fu, who at 71 is the oldest death row inmate. Both cases resulted in death sentences without any "direct evidence." Chiou Ho-shun's confession was even extracted through police torture back then, while Wang Hsin-fu was convicted simply because someone else claimed he was guilty. To this day, both men remain locked away in the Tucheng Detention Center and Tainan Detention Center, waiting for the state to grant them a fair and impartial trial, waiting for the freedom they lost long ago.

Whenever the public is filled with indignation and cries for the government to immediately carry out the death penalty, I think of Wang Hsin-fu and Chiou Ho-shun still languishing in prison. Some might say that we just need to weed out the innocent before carrying out executions, but please do not forget the irreversible tragedy that befell Lu Cheng, the heartbroken figures of Lu Cheng's sisters in *Record of Murder in the Island Nation*, and how the Tu brothers and Chiang Kuo-ching were ruthlessly gunned down by the state. These histories and human lives should not be easily forgotten; instead, we must ponder with even greater caution and trepidation whether the state holds the power to carry out the death penalty.

Advocating for and rescuing wrongful death penalty cases—the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty and we have never stopped. We hope that through a soft, arts-and-culture exhibition, we can spark more discussion and communication regarding the abolition or retention of the death penalty, the harms inflicted by the system, and the lives of death row inmates.