The Taiwan High Court sentenced a Canadian man to five years in prison on Monday for smuggling cannabis into Taiwan via express delivery in April last year.
The court said in its ruling that Robertsen Kory David, 30, accepted US$1,500 from Briton Michael Richardson to smuggle the marijuana for him.
David bought 2kg of cannabis in Canada on April 18 last year, put it it in a cat food bag and had it sent by an international express delivery service to his address in Taiwan.
The company's screening unit at Taoyuan International Airport reported the case to Aviation Police after discovering that the bag contained cannabis.
ARREST
Plainclothes police officers disguised as delivery workers delivered the package to David's residence and arrested him as soon as he signed the receipt and took possession of the package.
During questioning and District and High Court proceedings, David had confessed to smuggling the drugs.
Prosecutors sought a 15 year prison sentence, but the Taipei District Court gave him 10 years.
The Taiwan High Court ruled that although Davis had received US$1,500 as payment for smuggling the cannabis, this could not be construed as his having had the intention of selling the drug.
Describing the 2kg of cannabis involved in the case as "not a small amount," the court said that the offense could not be compared with drug traffickers who smuggle far larger quantities of drugs.
REMORSE
The court also took note of the fact that David was not a professional criminal and that he was remorseful about what he had done. As a result, the court decided to reduce his sentence to five years.
Cannabis is listed as a Class B drug. Anyone convicted of trafficking Class B drugs faces from seven years to life in prison.
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
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
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