The Taiwan High Court on Wednesday upheld Tsou Ya-ting’s (鄒雅婷) 20-year prison sentence, after the Taipei District Court convicted her in the first trial of manslaughter in the death of a two-month-old infant.
Tsou, the victim’s aunt, added salt to the milk formula of her niece, “Hsiang Hsiang” (緗緗), four times due to disagreements with Hsiang Hsiang’s mother, causing the baby to die from hypernatremia.
The first trial had deemed that despite disagreements between the in-laws, the incident did not constitute premeditated murder because the in-laws did not have cause for the kind of hatred that might have provided a motive for the killing.
Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office prosecutor Chen Hung-ta (陳宏達) disagreed with the ruling and argued that Tsou’s actions were premeditated.
Chen said that after Hsiang Hsiang had been hospitalized because sea salt had been added to her formula a third time, “anyone with a conscience would stop if they were not planning a murder,” but instead, Tsou added refined salt to the formula, in addition to the sea salt.
“If this does not count as premeditated murder, then I do not know what does,” Chen said.
The ruling for the second trial said that the defendant did not intend to kill, but had intended to harm, adding that the sentence in the first trial was fair.
The ruling was not final and can be appealed.
When Tsou was called by the High Court to testify, she said that she had only wanted Hsiang Hsiang to suffer and had not intended for her to die.
Meanwhile, Tsou’s lawyer, Chou Wu-jung (周武榮), said that his client was continuing to ask the plaintiff to settle out of court.
Chou also said that the sentence was “too harsh” on his client and that he would file an appeal in the hope that the Supreme Court would remand the case to the Taiwan High Court for review and retrial.
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:
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