Lu Hsui-lien, thirty six, holds advanced law degrees from the University of Illinois and Harvard. She not only practiced law but was also, until recently, a writer and editor, a dedicated campaigner for human rights in general and women's rights in particular, and a candidate for the Yuan,'Taiwan's national legislative assembly. Lu now spends her days in a cramped and musty cell, her spirit broken by sixty days of grueling interro gation during which not even her family knew of her whereabouts. Threatened with the murder of family and friends as well as her own execution, she ultimately signed a prefabricated confession of sedition.

The threat to murder members of her family was not one that Lu could afford to dismiss lightly. One of her co-defendants, Lin Yi hsuing, thirty nine, a provincial assemblyman who had studied law at Berkeley, had lost his mother and his seven-year-old twin daughters, all three stabbed to death by a nameless nighttime intruder while his interrogation was under way. When Lin continued uncooperative, his interrogators reminded him that he had still another daughter and a wife.