Case
Facts
In 2014, Taichung District Court found Chang, Chen-Chung guilty of several criminal offenses, which included burglaries, attempted larcenies, and damages from March to April 2013 in Shalu District, Taichung City. The court held Chang guilty based on the following shreds of evidence,such as his guilty pleas in the investigation and eyewitness identification.
Issues
According to Chang,he had never gotten involved in these cases. It was not until one occasional visit by a police officer, who asked him why he admitted to those crimes he didn’t commit, that Chang determined to claim his innocence.
Among the cases, Chang’s wife noticed one of them appeared in another verdict of another irrelevant defendant,meaning that two convictions were made for one criminal fact (with the same victim, the same location and a single suspect, etc.) by the court separately. It was evident that the court wrongfully rendered judgements on the crime twice with different conclusions.
In the previous investigation of Chang’s case, the shoe prints collected in the victim’s house, which could have been exculpatory evidence, were not used in the trial. However, a later comparison indicated that the shoe prints actually resembled the ones of the other defendant.
Moreover, the previous identification procedure was also challengeable. According to the regulations at the time,the police shall collect portraits of people with similar appearances based on witnesses’ descriptions of the suspect and provide them to the witnesses as materials for identification. However, in this case, the police directly asked the female victim to identify the suspect without asking her about the perpetrator’s appearance in advance.
The other conviction became the crucial clue to discover the truth and further proved Chang’s innocence.Through shoe prints comparison, the police found the actual perpetrator who had also admitted to the crime and was subsequently guilty verdict. In May 2021, Taichung District Court granted a retrial for Chang.
Progress
While the case reopened, Taiwan Taichung District Court began the judiciary proceedings and summoned the real perpetrator of the other case to the court to cross-examine. On January 25, 2022, the court found Chang not guilty.
On July 13, 2022, Taiwan High Court Taichung Branch Court dismissed the appeal filed by the prosecutor. Eventually, Chang is finally exonerated.