Letter to the District Attorney

This is a
letter I wrote to the D.A. on 16 August of this year, and which was
translated into Chinese. (The formatting is lost in the Copy however.)
Letter:


16 August 2000

Dear Mr. District Attorney,

Last year I filed a libel suit against members of a Review Committee at
National Cheng Kung University. You rejected this complaint on the basis
that, in effect, the committee acted in "good faith" based on a letter of
accusation against me. You also argued, as I’ve been informed, that the
committee decision was "private," and therefore did not injure my reputation
publicly.
I would like respectfully to challenge these conclusions based on the
following reasons.

1. Taiwan’s Chief Justice has ruled that university officials can be held
ACCOUNTABLE under CRIMINAL laws for UNPROVEN accusations. This statement
was signed by the Honorable SHIH CHI YANG, President of the Judicial Yuan,
25 September, in the 87th year of the ROC.
2. The letter against me that you use to excuse review members was actually
signed by three review members (two of them actually present at the
meeting), hence cannot be considered as independent proof.
3. But even if this letter was an independent document, the Chief Justice
decision makes clear that all accusations must be investigated.
4. At least in Western law, malice is not a necessary condition to prove
libel. Simply spreading unproven accusations is a sufficient condition to
prove libel.
5. The fact that no such investigation of accusations against me occurred,
even though review members had an entire year to do so, suggests the
accusations against me were not made in "good faith." Again, one need not
prove malice to prove libel; mere negligence in the spreading of false and
injurious information is enough.
6. In any case, the fact that I was not even notified about these
accusations almost certainly proves malice, since it is beyond belief that
the very person accused of something would not be notified of those
accusations unless malice was intended. In any case, malice is not
necessary to prove libel; injury to one’s reputation is sufficient.
7. The fact that the Chairman put these unproven accusations in every
teacher’s mail box again strongly suggests that malice was the motive; and
in itself proves that the injury was of a public nature, discrediting me
with my colleagues. One does not have to prove that libel affects a
person’s universal reputation. It is sufficient to prove that libel either
discredits or tends to discredit a person’s local reputation, especially in
the areas of his profession and moral values. Recently a Taiwan judge
awarded substantial damages because a person was accused of being
"homosexual" in front of family members. This embarrassment was sufficient
for the judge to award damages (hundreds of thousands of dollars), however
small the "public" was.
8. The fact that this libel resulted in my dismissal from the university,
including a written statement of the reasons for my dismissal based on that
unproven letter, again proves that the letter resulted in public injury, the
basic condition to prove libel. In addition, it proves that the letter
"injured" me, since I lost my job because of it!
9. Basic principles of democratic law include the assumption of innocence
and the principle of social contagion: In other words, what would happen to
society if all people committed an offense? What would happen if it became
common behavior to recklessly make unproven accusations against employees?
What if a committee at an American university recklessly made unproven
accusations against a Taiwan student studying there and then put those
accusations in the mailboxes of all of her classmates. Would you consider
that appropriate behavior or would you insist that American authorities
prosecute the officials for injuring the reputation of your child? At stake
here, both morally and legally, is the principle of reciprocity: would you
be so tolerant of such behavior if you or one of your family members was a
victim of it?
10. Based on these reasons, I respectfully urge you to reconsider your
dismissal of my libel suit. If Taiwan is to develop as a mature democracy,
legal authorities must strongly censure what are essentially vicious and
authoritarian practices of malice and intimidation in the form of libel and
slander. University officials are not immune from prosecution if they make
reckless or unproven accusations. Taiwan’s Chief Justice has made this
plain. That legal ruling should be enforced.

I hope that justice can be effected in this case, based on universal
principles of reason.

Respectfully yours, [etc.]