Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) said yesterday that he was supporting an initiative to tighten the threshold for parole in cases of repeat sex offenders.
“Showing mercy to the wicked is tantamount to abusing the good,” Wu said when asked at a legislative meeting about the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl.
The junior high school student went missing after she left her home on March 13.
After reviewing footage from street cameras, police arrested a suspect surnamed Lin (林), a convicted sex offender, and found the girl’s bicycle near his home in Yunlin County.
Lin confessed to strangling the girl to death as she vigorously resisted him, police said. He said he had disposed of the body at a riverside in Changhua County, where it was later found by police.
The case has triggered massive public outcry, as Lin had already been convicted of two sex offenses and had just been released from jail on parole last month.
Questions were raised in public forums on whether the country’s parole laws were being abused, particularly in cases involving repeat sex offenders.
Lin was first granted parole in 2000, halfway through a jail term of five years and eight months for the rape of a young girl. He was again released on parole last month while serving a nine-year sentence for sexually abusing a woman in 2002.
The family of his latest victim has raised the question of whether crime prevention authorities in Yunlin County had failed in their duties by not requiring that Lin wear an electronic tag, as is required for sex offenders on parole.
“How can such villains be freed from prison over and over and allowed to hurt more innocent people?” the girl’s father asked.
He urged the government to immediately revise its policy on preventing sex crimes.
Wu said the Ministry of Justice should also consider a regulation that would require sex offenders on parole to wear GPS devices that would allow full-time monitoring.
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