The murder of a 10-year-old boy whose throat was slit in a games arcade in Greater Tainan over the weekend has reignited a debate over the death penalty after the suspect reportedly said he would get away with a life sentence.
Public anger mounted after 29-year-old suspect Tseng Wen-chin (曾文欽) was quoted in the media as saying he would get a life sentence at most “even if he were to kill two or three people” and that he wanted to go to jail to avoid having to worry about living expenses.
Protesters, who were outraged by reports the suspect said he “targeted kids because they were less likely to fight back,” gathered outside the Ministry of Justice yesterday to demand the execution of the nation’s death-row inmates.
There are currently 61 inmates on death row, caught in limbo partly because of a lengthy legal process and partly by a virtual moratorium on executions. The longest-serving of them has been waiting on death row for 25 years.
“We demand that the government abide by the law and enforce capital punishment to maintain law and order in our society. We oppose abolishing the death penalty,” said Angela Wang (王薇君), head of a child welfare promotion association.
As the government has not carried out any executions in almost two years, some criminals are getting the impression that they can avoid the death sentence even if they commit murder, Wang said.
Taiwan reserves the death penalty for serious crimes, including aggravated murder, kidnapping and robbery, but politicians are divided about whether to maintain it.
A lingering debate on abolishing the death penalty was renewed recently, particularly after judicial and military authorities came under fire over the execution of a soldier wrongly convicted of murdering a child.
Chiang Kuo-ching (江國慶), a 21-year-old serviceman executed in 1997, had insisted he was innocent and that he was coerced by a group of officers into confessing.
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