The Supreme Court yesterday ordered a retrial for Tang Ching-hua (湯景華), a convicted arsonist who had been on death row, after being found guilty of setting a fire that killed six people in New Taipei City.
Tang, 51, was handed the death sentence in May, after the Taiwan High Court upheld an earlier New Taipei City District Court ruling.
According to the ruling, Tang was involved in an altercation with Weng Hsiang-chih (翁祥智) and another man at a restaurant in April 2014. He filed assault charges against Weng, but lost the case.
Photo: Chen Wei-tse, Taipei Times
In an apparent attempt to get back at Weng, Tang set the fire at an old apartment building in Sanchong District (三重) on March 23, 2016, which resulted in the deaths of six of Weng’s family members. Weng escaped from the burning building.
Yesterday, judges said that Tang’s defense had provided a medical record stating that Tang had a neurotic disorder, but that in the second ruling, the prosecution did not call on a psychiatrist or medical expert to evaluate whether Tang was eligible to have his sentence reduced because of the disorder.
The judges said that there was also an inconsistency between the wording used in the High Court’s conviction, which said that Tang had committed manslaughter with “indirect intent,” and in the “facts of the case” section, where it said that Tang had committed manslaughter with “direct intent.”
Photo: Cheng Shu-ting, Taipei Times
During the first trial, prosecutors said Tang had told police: “I only wanted to give him [Weng] a warning. I had no idea the blaze would become so intense and cause so many people’s deaths. What I did was wrong.”
However, in the second trial, Tang retracted his admission.
He said he could not remember what happened that night, and that he was innocent.
However, footage from surveillance cameras, showed Tang riding his motorcycle to the area, then carrying containers filled with gasoline and two large bags of newspapers to the apartment building. Footage from another camera showed him setting the newspapers alight and pouring gasoline onto motorcycles parked in front of the apartment.
In the first two rulings, the judges said that they handed him the death sentence because his actions, in revenge for a minor squabble, had required planning and he had started a blaze in a densely populated residential area, which showed he had complete disregard for human life and property.
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