After being declared not guilty after a years-long corruption trial, the case against former National Science Council official Shieh Ching-jyh (謝清志) is now considered closed after prosecutors on Friday said they would not appeal the sentence with the Supreme Court.
Shieh is one of the few government officials from the former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration who has been charged with corruption, but finally acquitted after years of trial.
Ten defendants, including Shieh and Hsu Hung-chang (許鴻章), owner of Sheus Technologies Corp — also known as Hung Hua Engineering — were indicted in December 2006 on corruption charges after Sheus won an NT$8.05 billion (US$262 million) construction tender to reduce the vibrations caused by the high-speed rail as it passes through the Southern Taiwan Science Park.
High-tech companies with operations in the park, such as chip manufacturers, are affected by vibrations above 48 decibels.
The Tainan District Court found Shieh not guilty in August 2008, and after Tainan prosecutors appealed the ruling with the High Court’s Tainan branch, the branch again acquitted Shieh in June of 2010.
Prosecutors then appealed the case with the Supreme Court, and the top judicial authority ordered the High Court’s Tainan branch to retry the case. On July 11, the Tainan branch found Shieh not guilty for a second time. This time, prosecutors said they would not appeal the case, therefore the verdict finding Shieh innocent is final.
All rulings in the five-and-a-half years of trials found Shieh innocent because of insufficient evidence to prove his guilt.
Liu Jung-tang (劉榮堂), a spokesman for the Tainan Prosecutors’ Office, said on Friday that prosecutors had found no legal grounds to bring the case to the Supreme Court again.
Shieh, who said the charges were politically motivated to discredit the DPP administration, added that although the case was closed, the damage and insult could not be erased.
Shieh, said he would file a wrongful imprisonment compensation lawsuit.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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