Trial and Error: A Comparative Perspective on the Lay Participation in Criminal Trials and Appellate Review of Errors in Taiwan

Taiwan follows its East Asian counterparts to establish a system of lay participation in criminal trials, which is called citizen judges and took effect in January 2023. But Taiwan will soon face similar conundrums, like Japan and South Korea have encountered, about whether to allow professional judges to review and even reverse decisions made by citizen judges. In a mock case, the Taiwan High Court and Taiwan’s Supreme Court both attempted to address the conflict from a perspective of American law, but more controversies have emerged than been solved. This Article follows the route of the two courts and deals with those unsettled controversies in four aspects: legal errors, factual errors, sentencing errors, and the mixed questions of law and fact. This Article advises appellate courts to: (1) employ principles like preservation of claims, plain errors, and harmless errors when reviewing legal errors de novo, (2) incorporate the substantial evidence review with the existing law into a two-step test, through which the appellate review of factual errors may work better, (3) interpret the standard of exceeding unreasonableness in an abuse-of-discretion way when investigating errors in sentencing, and (4) replace the de novo standard with a spectrum approach when reviewing the errors of impropriety, namely the mixed question of law and fact in Taiwan’s context. Through these adjustments in the appellate review process, the new system of citizen judges will better serve to enhance the public knowledge of and confidence in criminal trials as the new system has been entailed.