Sun Kuo-huang (孫國晃) was spared the death sentence yesterday in favor of life imprisonment in the fourth retrial for 2010 murder of a graduate student in Kaohsiung.
The Kaohsiung Branch of Taiwan High Court found the 42-year-old Sun guilty of the murder of Chang Chih-tien (張志添), a doctoral student at National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, but overturned the previous convictions that had sentenced him to death.
The judges’ ruling said that while Sun had admitted to the murder in the earlier trials, he had been segregated from society since his earlier convictions, during which time he received educational training, indicting there was a possibility of rehabilitation.
Photo: Wang Jung-hsiang, Taipei Times
Prosecutors had long argued that Sun, who was 30 at the time of Chang’s death, had murdered him in a bid to steal his identity and avoid serving an eight-year and six-month prison sentence he had received in October 2010 for the repeated rapes of a high-school student in 2006.
He had recorded the first rape and used it to blackmail the teenager into have sex over a six-month period.
Prosecutors said he arranged to meet Chang at a hotel in November 2010 to go out and meet girls, but instead attacked Chang, choking him into unconsciousness before driving him in a car to a remote mountain road, where he doused Chang and the car with gasoline and set them on fire.
Sun planted items around the burned car, including a suicide note, in an effort to mislead police into thinking Sun had committed suicide, prosecutors said.
Sun later took Chang’s personal documents to a local government office to get a new national identification card in Chang’s name, which he used for about two weeks before police were able to track him down and arrest him for Chang’s murder.
Police had been suspicious of Chang’s death, as his body was found with his hands tied behind his back.
Yesterday’s verdict was condemned by Chang’s father and members of the public, who criticized the judges for showing leniency to a calculating killer who had kept appealing through his lawyers to avoid capital punishment.
“Our nation’s justice system is protecting a convicted killer from the death penalty. The judges have no empathy for victims and their families,” Chang’s father said in a statement.
“We have seen the justice system always speak up on behalf of the criminals and help protect them. The trials and appeals keep going for many years, but for families of the victims, these cause us suffering and pain and trample on our rights again and again,” he wrote.
He appealed to prosecutors to appeal yesterday’s verdict.
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