Wu, Ming-Feng

Facts

Two female victims were robbed by two teenagers riding on a scooter with a knife on the morning of one day in July 1999. The police, suspicious about Wu Ming-Feng, who committed a similar misdemeanor nearby, showed his and only his picture to the victims for identification. The prosecution charged Wu as both victims identified Wu as the one who robbed them with a knife. He was later found not guilty by the Banqiao District Court for insufficiency of the evidence. However, the High Court revoked the ruling and sentenced Wu to five years in prison. Wu did not appeal in time, and his conviction was finalized in 1999.

Issues: Eyewitness Misidentification and Flawed Polygraph Result

There were evident flaws in the eyewitness identification process of this case. First, single-photo identification was used during the process. In addition, the victim and the witness first told the police that the robber was 170 cm tall, yet they changed their statements in their second statements to the police right after seeing Wu’s picture and Wu in person.

Another piece of evidence based on which the Court convicted Wu was that he failed the lie detector test conducted by Li Fu-Kuo, the polygraph examiner from the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice. In 2017, an investigatory report issued by the Control Yuan (a supervisory and auditory branch of our government) explicitly pointed out that the polygraph results conducted by the examiner Li did not meet today’s standards and that a review of all the reports Li produced in the past shall be necessary. According to the report, Li now believes polygraph results shall not be admissible to the Court.

Besides the misleading eyewitness identification evidence and the problematic polygraph result, no objective evidence that could prove him guilty was recovered. Neither the other robber nor the stolen goods and the knife were found.

Progress: Retrial and Exoneration

TIP received Wu’s application in 2017 and decided to take his case in 2019. The first move was petitioning the Control Yuan to examine Wu’s case, especially the problematic eyewitness identification and polygraph conducting process. 

In January 2020, the Control Yuan issued another investigatory report, recognizing Wu’s innocence, and urged the Ministry of Justice to consider post-conviction reliefs for him. With no further action carried out by the MOJ for the next ten months, TIP decided to file a motion for retrial on behalf of Wu in November 2020, using the report as the new evidence. The retrial was granted on July 21st, 2021. 

After the four-month retrial proceeding, the High Court eventually acquitted him on November 17th, 2021, stating that due to the evident flaws in the eyewitness identification procedures and the polygraph test process, the evidence provided by the prosecution was insufficient to support the charge against Wu. 

Wu was fully exonerated on April 21st, 2022, when the High Court dismissed the prosecution’s appeal.