The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the ruling of the second retrial and gave People First Party (PFP) Legislator Lin Cheng-er (林正二) a final sentence of a 20-month prison term for buying votes in his legislative election campaign in 2007.
Central Election Commission Secretary-General Teng Tien-yu (鄧天祐) said that although Lin was declared guilty of vote-buying in the election for the seventh legislature, not the current, eighth legislature, he would still lose his status as a lawmaker as soon as the commission receives the verdict, since Lin has also been deprived of his civil rights by the court.
“No matter why or when he committed the misconduct that led to him being deprived of his civil rights, it takes effect when the verdict is handed down and will remove him from the post,” Teng said.
This will leave his party’s legislative caucus with only two lawmakers. This could place the PFP caucus in jeopardy, because establishing a party caucus requires a minimum of three lawmakers.
Lin was on Wednesday indicted in a separate case by the Taichung Prosecutors’ Office. He and his aide were accused of requesting and receiving kickbacks of at least NT$6.29 million (US$210,000) from local construction projects while colluding with local government officials and councilors in 2006.
Lin was accused of laying on a feast for Aboriginal leaders in Taoyuan County’s Dayuan Township (大園) during his election campaign in November 2007, but was found not guilty in the second trial and the first retrial, before the second retrial overturned the previous ruling.
Judges in the second trial said that Lin’s feast had constituted an act of vote buying.
Additional reporting by Loa Iok-sin
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