Why is chief justice Weng ‘indignant’ now?

In a farewell speech, the outgoing president of the Judicial Yuan charged “some people” yesterday with “trampling on justice,” that made his heart bleed and tormented him beyond description, while he was in office.

Lai In-jaw, a holder of a Harvard S.J.D., succeeded Weng. The president of the Judicial Yuan is the ex officio chairman of the Council of Grand Justices. That office is equivalent to the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For a long time, Weng has been criticized as a judicial marshmallow.

He has failed to defend the independence of the power of judiciary.

One latest case was President Chen Shui-bian’s charges that seven or eight out of every ten judges support what is known as the pan-green alliance of the Kuomintang and the People First Party.

Of course, President Chen falsely accused the judiciary. It is untrue. At the very least, all judges tried to be independent, but Weng chose to remain silent.

Earlier, however, every Democratic Progressive Party leader attacked the Kaohsiung district court judges for invalidating the election of Chen Chu as mayor of the southern Taiwan port city.

Shieh Jhy-wei, director-general of the Government Information Office, even demanded that the district court make public the party affiliation of the judges. He probably didn’t know that judges can never be members of any political party, according to the law.

But the outgoing chief justice of the country kept mum, too.

These are cases of trampling upon justice in every sense of that term. Weng, as guardian of justice, should have come out in the open to stop the continuous inroads on the administration of law. If he couldn’t, he had to step down.

He didn’t identify “some people” who exerted political interferences.

Everyone knows President Chen is one of them, however.

Yet Weng requested President Chen, who used to be his student at the Taiwan University law school, to witness the take-over at the Judicial Yuan.

And Weng blasted “some people” after President Chen had left.

With such a toadying pushover as Weng at the head of the nation’s judiciary, judges of the country certainly have to think twice if they should try remaining independent.

Weng’s detractors certainly have reason to call him the gutless marshmallow of a top judge.

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