The News Lens
Date: 2017/09/30
By: Olivia Yang
A lie left Su Pin-kun fighting for his innocence for over 30 years. He is still at war.
Su Pin-kun (蘇炳坤), 68, stands in front of a judge at the Taiwan High Court seeking
Photo Credit: Shutterstock / 達志影像
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to be retried for a crime he did not commit. The stocky, dark-skinned man sports a white short-sleeved polo shirt and gray trousers. Intense yet weary eyes stare out from thin-rimmed glasses — he looks like a battle-scarred war vet but when he speaks his voice is strong and firm.
“The president’s amnesty didn’t give me back my innocence.”
The man chokes up. The hearing, along with the glorious summer afternoon outside the air-conditioned courtroom, proceeds.
The lie
On June 19, 1986, Kuo Chung-hsiung (郭中雄) told the lie that would set Su on the run for a decade and see him falsely imprisoned for a further three years. Kuo was 34 at the time, and had just been arrested for the robbery of a jewelry store in Hsinchu, northern Taiwan. The owner of the store suffered a knife injury to his head during the incident. In the course of the interrogation, the police pinned Kuo for another jewelry heist that had occurred earlier in the year. He pleaded guilty to both crimes, but claimed that Su, then 36, was an accomplice in the first robbery, along with a third person who it was later proved did not exist. [FULL STORY]
