The High Court on Thursday ruled that a man wrongly imprisoned for nearly 16 years should receive NT$28.12 million (US$932,072) in compensation, a record amount for a person wrongfully convicted in a criminal case.
Hsu Tzu-chiang (徐自強) was last year declared not guilty by the High Court in the ninth retrial of his case, in which he was accused of playing a role in the 1995 kidnapping and murder of a wealthy businessman.
Hsu was held in custody for 5,808 days from June 24, 1996, to May 18, 2012, a statement issued by the High Court said.
Photo courtesy of Good Day Films
However, he was also concurrently detained in an unrelated gambling case for 184 days, so the court ruled he should receive NT$5,000 in compensation for each of the remaining 5,624 days he was wrongfully jailed.
The review panel said Hsu’s conviction was based on confessions by his codefendants, but those were found to have been obtained unlawfully by the police.
Hsu was employed as a truck driver on a salary of more than NT$100,000 per month before he was arrested and he was deemed financially stable, as he was able to lend money to friends, invest in a betel nut stand and jointly purchase pre-construction real estate with his brother, the panel said.
Hsu was held in custody in the prime of his life at the age of 26 and not released until the age of 43, depriving him of 16 years of freedom, family and career, the court said.
In 2011, a military court awarded NT$100 million in compensation to the family of Chiang Kuo-ching (江國慶), a soldier who was wrongly executed for the rape and murder of a young girl, the highest ever awarded for a miscarriage of justice in a military case.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the