The Taiwan High Court on Tuesday upheld a conviction against three men in the beating death of gang member Chen Chih-chiang (陳智強) in June last year, but handed down heavier punishments, saying the defendants had carried out the murder with extreme cruelty and had shown no remorse for their actions.
The High Court sentenced Lee Hao (李灝) to 18 years in prison, Lee Chih-hao (李志豪) to 13 years and Chen Po-an (陳柏安) to 12 years in the second ruling in the case.
The New Taipei City District Court in the first ruling sentenced the men to 14 years, 12 years and 11 years in prison respectively.
The suspects were all 25 years old when they kidnapped Chen Chih-chiang before beating him with a baseball bat and metal rods.
They have said they wanted to “teach him a lesson” over a dispute.
Background checks showed that Chen Chih-chiang was the boss of a local chapter of the Bamboo Union gang and was active in Taipei’s Nangang (南港) and New Taipei City’s Sijhih (汐止) districts, where the organized crime syndicate had been involved in loan sharking, debt collection and extortion, officials said.
The defendants were reportedly low-ranking members of a rival chapter of the Tien Dao Meng gang operating in the same areas, and they had a financial dispute with the victim over the operation of underground businesses.
Lee Hao led the beating and torture of Chen Chih-chiang, which involved using a heated metal rod to burn his back and buttocks, in addition to repeated blows using a bat and rods, investigators said.
After three hours of beating, the suspects wrapped duct tape around Chen Chih-chiang’s neck, who later died from the injuries he had sustained and loss of blood, investigators said.
An autopsy determined that Chen Chih-chiang’s body was covered in bruises and his skull was fractured, they added.
The suspects appealed the first ruling, saying they should not be charged with murder and that it was a case of causing unintentional death due to injuries, which carries a lighter sentence.
The High Court struck down the appeal, saying they had killed the victim in an extremely cruel manner, had initially denied taking part in the beating and showed no remorse for their actions.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift