Normal office hours have come and gone. Yu Shiew-tuan, a prosecutor for ten years, leaves her office at the Taipei District Prosecutor's Office (TDPO) and heads to her car with an armload of documents that she will take home. By the time she and her husband have had dinner and she has fed their one-year-old and put him to bed, it's past 11 before she can actually start working on the documents she brought home. She scrambles to key in evidence collected during a search as she writes up a statement of charges to be used the next day in an overlending case. When she finishes the 30-page statement, it's almost daybreak and about time to head back to the office.

Most prosecutors are like Yu in that they bring their work home with them every day. This is especially true of female prosecutors with families to take care of. They frequently get their household responsibilities out of the way before digging back into their work, either at home or back at the office. To make working overtime more convenient, district prosecutor's offices all around Taiwan are open around the clock. It is common practice for prosecutors to work more than 12 hours a day, every day, making them leading candidates for physical and psychological illnesses related to stress and overwork.

Prosecutors are required to personally investigate crime scenes regardless of any danger. Yu Shiew-tuan's delicate frame is filled with immeasurable determination and a passion to seek out the truth.

Anticorruption taskforce

After passing through metal-detector-equipped doors of the TDPO, you are struck by the hubbub of people--police officers walking in and out of the lobby or dashing about with stacks of documents, multitudes of private citizens seeking legal consultation or protection. With the exception of defendants and plaintiffs, the second-floor investigations office is off-limits to the public, which must restrict its activities to the first floor, increasing the clamor downstairs that much more.

In sharp contrast, the third-floor prosecutors' offices are much quieter. The TDPO is the largest district prosecutor's office in Taiwan with over 100 prosecutors. Four to five prosecutors each share an office, squeezed into humble little cubicles where you'll find them buried in their work. Almost every prosecutor is responsible for more than 100 cases at any given time. Their cramped cubicles are only big enough for two or three filing cabinets and it's not uncommon for the files for one case to fill up an entire filing cabinet drawer.

"When we handled the case in which a company was illegally trading over-the-counter stocks of 18 unlisted companies, more than ten boxes of unprocessed papers were unceremoniously dumped on us. Simply sorting the documents took an entire month." Yu was once a member of the team handling women's and children's cases, but after taking on that particular case, she was reassigned to the anticorruption team to focus on high-profile and extremely tough cases involving corruption and major financial scandals, like the stock market Vulture Case, the Kuo Hua Life Insurance embezzlement case, and the Third Nuclear Power Plant construction inspection scandal.

"All cases at the district prosecutors office are distributed openly and fairly by random computer selection, but to increase the efficiency of case processing, the office still assigns prosecutors to various specialized teams," she explains. The TDPO, for example, has task forces on drugs, illegal land use, corruption, women and children, and intellectual property rights, all of which require prosecutors with experience handling such cases.

When tackling her first bank overlending case, Yu, one of six members of the anticorruption team, couldn't even make heads or tails of a financial statement. She had no choice but to ask her CPA husband for help and to take classes at various financial organizations, such as the stock exchange and Financial Supervisory Commission.

"Obviously, we can ask administrative prosecutors with financial backgrounds to assist, but as prosecutors, we still need to learn the stuff ourselves, if we are going to make fair and independent judgments." That said, Taiwan lacks judicial personnel with specialized backgrounds. This stands in stark contrast to legal specialists in most other countries, where law is taught in postgraduate programs to students with divergent backgrounds, including economics, sociology, and medicine. This helps to ensure that those handling cases are equipped with practical experience and aren't just going to get caught up in the letter of the law.

Yu believes that the prosecutor's greatest pressure stems from whether or not a case has been handled fairly. This is especially true when a defendant's lawyer presents strong counterevidence against the charges, or when a case requires more in-depth investigation but the deadline for completing the investigation is approaching, the prosecutor finds himself in a predicament: not pressing charges might let a criminal off the hook, but prosecuting hastily might do the accused injustice. Deducing whether the suspect is guilty or innocent requires a great deal of confidence and courage.

Once the investigative work on a criminal case is completed, prosecutors are required to seal relevant materials inside boxes which are then submitted to their superiors for inspection.

Slow wheels of justice

What's more, the average man on the street doesn't understand the judicial process, and consequently complains a great deal that cases are handled inefficiently and too much time is taken to arrive at verdicts.

"From its assignment to a prosecutor to the completion of investigation, each case is normally required to be wrapped up within eight months," confides Yu. During this time, the prosecutor convenes a number of investigative hearings based on the evidence or witnesses brought in by judicial police or investigators. Some cases, like those dealing with drink driving which have breathalyzer records taken at the scene, can be wound up after one hearing. But in more complex cases, like banking scams, the testimony of witnesses and data from the accounts need to be crosschecked, so that sometimes, with permission from senior prosecutors, an investigation may take more than a year to complete.

"When an investigation is concluded, the prosecutor must decide whether the case should go to court." If yes, the prosecutor sends the documents to the court, but because the courts are weighed down by heavier, more complex workloads than even prosecutors, it is more likely than not that one of these overworked, overstressed judges won't hear the case right away and many cases delayed as a result.

"It's par for the course for a case to take two, three, or more years to be finally wrapped up and during that time the prosecutor handling the case may be called to appear in court at any time." If the defendant does not accept the verdict (or the plaintiff does not accept a decision not to go to court), they can call for the case to be reconsidered, and the whole process has to be started all over again. After a verdict is given in a case, the defendant or the plaintiff can file an appeal. It's no wonder that many people feel that the legal process drags on and on. What's more, for prosecutors, who are saddled with more than 100 cases at any given time, it is hard to remain passionate about each and every one. To slog through the details of each case requires more perseverance and willpower than passion.

Each prosecutor handles cases independently and more often than not doesn't even know what cases colleagues, sitting at desks just a few feet away, are working on.

A tough journey

Selected as one of the ROC's Ten Outstanding Young Persons in 2005, Yu is never short of enthusiasm and energy for her job, one that she explains she never intended for herself. As the fourth of seven children of a mining family, she has felt the bite of poverty, so she determined as a child to become a doctor or lawyer, so that she could "make lots of money." But fate had other plans. Stricken with systemic lupus erythematosus, the frail Yu left school at age nine to help her family sell vegetables and to do odd jobs. She refused, however, to take her situation lying down. Driven by a never-give-up attitude, she tested into Taipei First Girls' High School's night school, and later majored in law at National Chung Hsing University.

After graduating, Yu passed both the bar and the Special Judicial Examination. She had a difficult time deciding whether to be a lawyer arguing all types of cases and raking in the money or a "judicial nanny of the people" on a fixed salary and working 70-plus hours a week. Her sense of justice, however, wouldn't allow her to hang her conscience up on a coat rack as she pleaded in defense of guilty clients, so in the end she tossed her hat in with the prosecutors.

Following two years of training in judicial studies and investigation, she graduated 18th in her class. "The channels used to produce judges and prosecutors are actually the same, and when there was a relative lack of judges a few years back, individuals with graduation rankings that were multiples of three--third, sixth, ninth, etc.--were assigned to become prosecutors, while the rest were made judges." In recent years, despite the serious lack of judges and prosecutors in Taiwan's judicial arena, the pass rate for the Special Judicial Examination has remained at an excruciatingly low 3-4%, much lower than the statutory 8% for lawyers on the bar exam, to ensure the caliber of the people accepted. Some test unsuccessfully for years on end, while others have literally dropped dead from exhaustion following the test. Situations like these have stirred up widespread discussion time and again within society.

Yu has been tireless in the performance of her duties as a prosecutor. She finally had a baby the year before last after having been married for six years.

"This job is so incredibly challenging," she confides. All criminal cases, that is, cases that involve the death sentence, life sentences, imprisonment, detention, or fines, lie within the prosecutor's job description. For her part, Yu has handled everything from "not returning found money to its rightful owner" to major criminal cases involving murder and robbery. She feels the satisfaction achieved from matching wits with perpetrators and discovering the truth in murky cases more than makes up for the long hours.

Taiwan's 21 district prosecutors' offices, however, only have 1000-plus prosecutors between them. Among them the Kinmen District Prosecutor's Office has the least with only four. In addition to reading case files, prosecutors frequently have to go out and play detective, and in murder cases they have to personally go to the crime scene to examine the bodies. Add to that investigative hearings and large quantities of paperwork (the longest bill of indictment Yu ever wrote was a 150-page tome), and it's no wonder she insists that her most pressing problems at present are the lack of enough hours in the day and feelings of helplessness and frustration.

Yu Shiew-tuan questions individuals in great detail about cases, often for five and six hours at a time, and investigates thoroughly all the evidence, material and otherwise. These sessions are nothing short of contests of wit and stamina.

Of, for, and by the people

A few morally and professionally substandard prosecutors have stirred up a hornet's nest as of late, but as Yu puts it, prosecutors are humans, not gods. They should keep pushing the bar of morality ever higher, but their efforts are not always good enough, because every individual finds himself in different circumstances and has different pressures foisted upon them. She notes that these problems are nothing new, but media hype has brought them to public attention in recent years. This isn't really fair for those that take their work seriously.

In any case, Yu continues, more people overseeing those in power and reporting abuse or inappropriate conduct is a good thing and the judicial branch is more than happy to see it. To be fair, judicial practices have improved a great deal. Not only is there a Judicial Reform Association in the private sector, various online forums for prosecutors allow them to share opinions anonymously or list areas that need improvement.

When asked about polls that show that the majority of people in Taiwan don't trust the judiciary, Yu says this is a phenomenon common to democratic nations and demonstrates the diversity of public opinion. Everybody fights for his own rights and is loath to bend to the decisions of the powers that be. Unfortunately, the public tends to be very opinionated about the judiciary despite their lack of understanding of the field, and prosecutors don't have the time or gumption to explain everything to them. This situation often leads to misunderstanding and "many judges actually find themselves on the business end of lawsuits as a result. In the end, however, their judgments are generally found to have been reasonable and just."

In order to improve the public's understanding of the judicial system, Yu often lectures on campuses, as she places her hope in educating the next generation. As she sees it, the better people understand the way the system works, the more stable society will become, the more tranquil will be the minds of the citizenry, and the more that prosecutors who uphold justice on behalf of the nation will be able to bring their energies to bear in the fight against crime.