Miranda in Taiwan: Why It Failed and Why We Should Care

In 1997, the Taiwanese legislature amended the Code of Criminal Procedure to incorporate the core of the American Miranda rule into the legal system. The Miranda rule requires police officers and prosecutors to notify criminal suspects subject to custodial interrogation of their right to remain silent and their right to retain legal counsel. In subsequent amendments, the legislature enacted a series of laws to further reform interrogation practices in the same vein. What happened next is a study in unintended consequences and the interdependence of law and culture. Using ethnographic methods and data sources collected over the past four years from 48 police officers and 99 prosecutors in metropolitan Taiwan, this Article relates a cautionary tale. Under Taiwan\u27s abbreviated Miranda system, suspects are encouraged to cooperate and give statements under the perception that they have been, and will continue to be, treated with politeness, dignity, and respect. Police and prosecutors use the Miranda mechanism (providing dignity, respect, and voice to suspects) to build rapport with suspects and distract them from the actual consequences of their full cooperation. Such concerns were implicated at a high level in the indictment of former Taiwanese president Ma Ying-Jeou in 2018, when prosecutors publicly denounced Ma for his bad attitude in exercising his right to remain silent during prosecutorial interviews. In short, Miranda in Taiwan has become a double-edged sword: it provides dignified and respectful treatment for suspects while simultaneously placing heavy extralegal burdens on them to cooperate with law enforcement agencies. Because Taiwan\u27s criminal justice system is a combination of western legal concepts and traditional Chinese social and cultural notions, Miranda and related rules have led to ever-greater discrepancies between what is written in the law books and how police interrogate in practice, and ever-greater gaps between suspects\u27 expectations and prosecutorial realities. Taiwan is not alone: more than one-hundred jurisdictions around the world now require warnings similar to the Miranda rule. It is possible that they suffer similar unintended consequences. I thus explore the effectiveness of alternative innovations beyond Miranda that could potentially reduce false confessions and minimize the risks caused by current interrogation practices

Cultivating Sense: Cultural Change in the Prosecutor’s Office

Prosecutors exercise broad discretion. They are widely viewed as the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system. To date, studies on prosecutors in different jurisdictions have largely focused on how to conceptualize, manage, and eventually control the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Scholars have recently turned their attention to the importance of internal organizational management and leadership’s role in changing office culture as a means to regulate prosecutorial discretion. But we have limited empirical evidence as to how changes occur within a prosecutor’s office and what precise role organizational leaders play during this process. This Article constructs a new paradigm for the understanding of cultural change within prosecutors’ offices. It reveals a troublesome paradox about modern prosecutorial power: I argue that, to transform organizational culture, prosecutors need to forge a new type of power based on what I refer to as “sense-making authority.” Meanwhile, the same power enables prosecutors to create an opaque process that bypasses organizational structure and reduces external accountability. To build my theory of cultural change, I rely on a comparative case-study approach based on ethnographic research. The research sites of the Article were a group of district attorneys’ offices led by “progressive prosecutors” across the United States and a district prosecutor’s office located in a metropolitan area of Taiwan. This Article proposes a contested cultural change model and explores ways in which the model could contribute much-needed theoretical and strategic groundings to the comparative study of prosecutorial reforms across different jurisdictions

Exploring Scientific Application Performance Using Large Scale Object Storage

One of the major performance and scalability bottlenecks in large scientific applications is parallel reading and writing to supercomputer I/O systems. The usage of parallel file systems and consistency requirements of POSIX, that all the traditional HPC parallel I/O interfaces adhere to, pose limitations to the scalability of scientific applications. Object storage is a widely used storage technology in cloud computing and is more frequently proposed for HPC workload to address and improve the current scalability and performance of I/O in scientific applications. While object storage is a promising technology, it is still unclear how scientific applications will use object storage and what the main performance benefits will be. This work addresses these questions, by emulating an object storage used by a traditional scientific application and evaluating potential performance benefits. We show that scientific applications can benefit from the usage of object storage on large scales.Comment: Preprint submitted to WOPSSS workshop at ISC 201