New Power Party (NPP) Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) yesterday described the Taipei District Court’s decision to grant former Taipei City Councilor Chin Li-fang (秦儷舫) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) a reprieve from two years in prison as “ridiculous,” and said it would reduce people’s trust in the judicial system.
The investigation found that Chin obtained more than NT$2 million (US$65,454 at the current exchange rate) in subsidies from the Taipei City Council between 2009 and 2014. While the subsidies should have been used to pay assistants’ salaries, three of her relatives pretended to be her assistants and she used the money to pay her housing loans and other family expenses.
The court last month found her guilty of corruption on 78 occasions. She was sentenced to two years in prison, but granted a reprieve.
Photo: Huang Yao-cheng, Taipei Times
According to Article 5 of the Criminal Code (刑法), she should be punished with a minimum of seven years in prison, Huang said on Facebook yesterday.
Chin’s case could be compared with that of Tainan City Councilor Lu Mei-chi (陸美祈) of the Democratic Progressive Party, who was sentenced to three years and six months in prison with no reprieve by the Tainan District Court for illegally obtaining more than NT$4 million in subsidies from the city council, he said, adding that it helps emphasize “how ridiculous the ruling on Chin was.”
Both courts found them guilty of corruption on two counts, with each councilor term considered as one count, and reduced their punishment on the grounds that they returned their illegal proceedings, Huang said.
However, Chin’s prison term was shortened even further because the Taipei District Court decided to reduce her punishment a second time on the grounds that she could be sympathized with, he added.
According to Article 59 of the Criminal Code, a punishment can be reduced if circumstances surrounding the offense can be sympathized with.
In Lu’s case, “the Tainan District Court rejected a request from the plaintiff to further reduce the punishment and said very clearly that the offense was planned over a long period, so there was nothing to be sympathized with,” he said.
He has urged the prosecutor on Chin’s case to lodge an appeal, but it is unknown whether his advice would be taken, Huang said.
“The extent to which transparency is lacking in the judiciary is beyond what we can imagine. I hope the prosecutor has appealed, because if not, it would again damage people’s trust in the system,” he added.
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