Family seeks an eye for an eye

After Vivi's death, her sister and friends created a Web page in memory of her. Now the Web page has become a discussion forum where people have been engaging in intense debate over whether the life sentence imposed on the 20-year-old girl's murderer was too lenient.

Chang Ya-ling (張雅玲), or "Vivi" as her sisters and friends called her, had her life taken by stalker Wang Hung-wei (王鴻偉), 25, on Sept. 26 last year. That morning Wang drove his white Mercedes car into Vivi, knocking her unconscious as she left her home in Tamshui for work. He then put her into the trunk of his car and drove off after which he attacked her twice, inflicting 176 slashes with a watermelon knife before abandoning her body in a vacant lot, the court judgement says.

Wang was promptly arrested on the day of Vivi's death. The prosecution charged him in November with murder and requested that he be sentenced to death in view of the brutality of the crime. But the Shihlin District Court on May 22 sentenced Wang to life imprisonment.

More lenient than expected, the sentence upset the victim's grieving family. An e-mail written by Jennifer Chang (張雅琪), Vivi's elder sister, then began to spread over the Internet.

"Does one deserve 176 cuts for rejecting someone's advances?" the victim's sister, a 23-year-old employee of a securities firm in Taipei, asked in the title of the letter.

In the widely forwarded e-mail, the broken-hearted sister said that her family was not demanding that the murderer necessarily be sentenced to death. "We just want the truth ... Don't let my sister die without having her soul comforted."

According to Taiwan's criminal code, a murder offense is punishable by death, imprisonment for life or for not less than 10 years.

Shihlin District Court judge Hsu Yung-huang (許永煌) in the court's judgement explained why a life sentence rather than a death sentence was handed down in the case. He said that the offender had no previous criminal record, had confessed to the crime, had apologized to the victim's family in court and had reached a civil compensation agreement with the family.

Wang reached an agreement with Vivi's family whereby he will pay NT$8.6 million in compensation to the Changs.

All this demonstrated that the accused was repentant and was willing to make amends for his deed and therefore should be given a chance to reform himself, the judgement said.

But Vivi's family cannot accept this. "Someone that has told the truth may be remorseful," Jennifer Chang said in an interview with the Taipei Times, "but Wang Hung-wei kept lying all along."

During the trial, Wang claimed that he wanted to drive Vivi to work on the morning of her death but he hit her with his car by accident after she refused his offer. He said that he then put her into the trunk of his car to take her to hospital but when, on the way, he opened the trunk to check on Vivi, she took a watermelon chopper to attack him so he grabbed the knife, slashing Vivi in self-defense. He then closed the trunk and continued to drive before stopping a second time and opening the trunk again, at which Vivi again resisted him so he slashed her once more, Wang said.

Taking into account the postmortem report and the testimonies from witnesses, the court denied Wang's claim that he had hit Vivi by accident and had cut her in self-defense.