The Taiwan High Court yesterday handed down a heavier prison sentence to Kuo Yen-chun (郭彥君), convicted of slashing four people at a Taipei Mass Rapid Transport (MRT) station last year.
The ruling was widely seen as a deterrent by the judiciary to random attacks and a move to address perceived shortcomings in Kuo’s first sentencing.
In Taipei’s Shilin District Court’s first ruling on Dec. 25 last year, Kuo was found guilty of offenses of causing intentional injury to four people, and was sentenced to three years in prison.
On July 20 last year, Kuo, then 27, carried a 20cm kitchen knife into Taipei’s Zhongshan MRT Station, where he slashed four people, three women and one man, as he walked down an escalator.
Kuo was apprehended by security guards with the help of several passers-by.
Investigators said that Kuo had been unemployed for a long period of time, slept on public park benches and was frustrated by society.
Kuo also had some psychological disturbance from habitual narcotics use, they said.
The High Court convicted Kuo on two counts of the more serious offense of attempted murder, increasing his sentence from three years to 12 years, after citing his victims’ medical reports showing that Kuo aimed his knife at the neck of a woman surnamed Chuang (莊) and a man surnamed Wei (魏).
Chuang was cut on the upper left chest, and Wei had cuts to an upper shoulder. As the carotid artery, the trachea and other vital organs are in those regions, Kuo had intended to take lives, the ruling said.
The ruling also said that when questioned during the investigation, Kuo said: “If no one stopped me, I would have continued and killed people inside the MRT station. I would have killed everyone there, one person at a time.”
Two other people were stabbed in the back, and the court convicted Kuo of causing intentional injury to them.
The court said Kuo chose his victims at random with the intention of taking lives, which overturned the first ruling that Kuo did not know the people and bore no animosity toward them and had no intention of killing them.
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