| dc.description.abstract | ABSTRACT
“Seeking the truth” is the foundation of criminal justice. While the incidents of major infrastructure disaster, the public’s attention is often spotlighted onto crisis containment and victim rescue, rather than possible criminal activities underneath the disaster; in such case, the function of criminal justice which seeks to prosecuting criminal acts must compete with the shifted public attention.
Seeking truth from the incident of infrastructure disaster involves the professional interplay of law and engineering. The process of discovering what has actually happened and who has acted criminally often calls for forensic examination. A well-executed forensic examination requires containment of the crime scene, traceable control of relevant individuals, thorough collection of on-site evidence, and foolproof chain of evidence. Any faulty leakage throughout the process may cost the prosecution the case in futile.
According to the Disaster Prevention and Protection Act, relevant government agencies will first response to a specific disaster, along with its personnel, instruments and heavy equipment. These intervening activities obviously would pollute a “crime scene”. Since the prosecutor is not part of the first-response agencies, this creates immense difficulty as well as impairment for criminal justice to function normally. Thus, this research work would inquire the relationship, under the legal structure, between the prosecutor and those first-response agencies, regarding the control of the personnel, disaster site, and other relevant activities, for criminal justice to properly fruition. It is also the aim of this work to discuss a collaborative procedure, thru which the prosecutor can direct and lead the disaster investigation, while allow the disaster rescue to proceed efficiently and effectively.
Based on literature review and the validation of field empirical evidence, this work has presented an administrative procedure which is effective and feasible. This work argues that the leadership of a prosecutor for managing a major infrastructure disaster is not just vital, but also constitutional legitimate. The parallel processing of disaster rescue and crime investigation is feasible, if the prosecutor would lay the rules for all stakeholders at the beginning and act as the pivot for communication among them. The findings of this work can be adopted as part of the current criminal investigation protocol, and contribute to quality assurance for future disaster investigative operations. | en_US |