The Control Yuan yesterday demanded that the Ministry of Justice reopen a murder case as it said the man who was convicted in the case could be a victim of a miscarriage of justice.
Control Yuan members Ma Yi-kung (馬以工) and two colleagues concluded in an investigation report published yesterday that there had been a violation of due process in the trial 10 years ago.
In the case, Hung Shih-wei (洪世緯) was found guilty, along with his friend Wang Chi-cheng (王淇政), of being complicit in a crime in which a woman surnamed Chen was pushed from the Houfong Bridge (后豐大橋) in Greater Taichung, leading to her death on Dec. 7, 2002.
Hung was sentenced to 12 years and six months for being complicit to a murder and was jailed in August 2009.
The Control Yuan members alleged that judges at the Taichung Branch Court of the Taiwan High Court hastily brought the trial to an end and presumed that Hung was guilty because evidence highlighting his innocence was left out of consideration in the verdict.
They said that judges failed to thoroughly probe Wang’s testimony that Hung had driven to a gas station to inflate the tires of a car and therefore could not have been at the scene of the crime.
Hung never confessed to the homicide during his trial, the Control Yuan report added.
Weather information provided by Central Weather Bureau (CWB) contradicted a witness statement that had been accepted by the court as evidence of Hung’s guilt that “three people were seen chasing each other on the bridge,” the Control Yuan report said.
Prosecutors and judges were of the view that the witness was able to see clearly what was happening over the bridge because the moon light provided visibility, but according to the CWB, there was no moon at that time, the Control Yuan report said.
The Control Yuan members said they would refer the report to the Ministry of Justice in the hope prosecutors file an extraordinary appeal to reinvestigate the case.
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