After the 4-year-old girl surnamed Chiu at the center of a scandal over child abuse and hospital facilities was pronounced brain-dead yesterday, the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office yesterday said the two Taipei Municipal Jen Ai Hospital involved would be charged with a more serious crime with a maximum term of imprisonment of five years, while the girl's father, whose beating was responsible for her injuries, was looking at a minimum jail term of seven years.
The girl had been in a coma since being beaten by her father two weeks ago.
"Two doctors, Lin Chin-nan (林致男) and Liu Chi-hwa (劉奇樺), had been charged with injury caused by occupational negligence, but because the girl died yesterday, they will now be charged with the more serious crime of causing death by occupational negligence," said the office's spokesman, Lin Pang-liang (林邦樑).
The two doctors will be also charged with forgery, Lin said.
The two doctors, who both work at Taipei Municipal Jen Ai Hospital, are accused of having never reviewed the girl's case and forging a report on the case in order to avoid responsibility.
The prosecutor in charge of the case took the two doctors' testimonies on Jan. 18, deciding to charge them and prohibiting them from leaving Taiwan.
The girl's father, who is in custody, is now charged with causing death by the infliction of grievous bodily harm," said Lin, for which he faces between a minimum of seven years in jail and a possible life sentence.
The girl's father earlier admitted to the prosecutor that he beat his daughter, but said that "it was his way to teach his daughter good behavior."
A law expert said that, since the girl's father is the defendant in the case, he cannot receive criminal victim's compensation. Also, Chiu's family could apply for compensation for medical negligence, but the father has no right to receive money should the compensation be granted.
Chiu's case become a cause celebre when she was tuned away from a number of Taipei hospitals and eventually had to go by ambulance to Taichung to get treatment
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater