The Supreme Court yesterday upheld an earlier ruling in which Taipei Prison inmate Kuo Yi-fan (郭亦凡) was sentenced to an addtional four years and six months in prison for stabbing his cellmate in the face and blinding him.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court said that Kuo, 34, had responded extremely to a minor squabble, and he should have known that stabbing the pointed end of a pen into a person’s eye would do serious harm.
When the attack occurred in June 2018, Kuo was serving a sentence for a narcotics conviction.
After the initial ruling, Kuo kept appealing the decision, as he believed the sentence was too harsh. He wanted to pay the victim compensation, but he and his family could not come up with the money, so his appeals were rejected.
Meanwhile, prosecutors on Monday indicted six people over the beating to death of an inmate surnamed Chen (陳) in Kaohsiung Prison.
Chen had allegedly been quarreling with other inmates for some time, and in October last year, four of them beat him up, prosecutors said, adding that two prison guards were also involved.
Chen was taken to a local hospital, but died shortly afterwards.
Prison guards reported that Chen was ill and became unconscious, but medical examiners found that he had ruptured internal organs, broken bones and numerous bruises, prosecutors said.
Charges in the case range from document forgery to physical assault resulting in death.
In another court ruling, the High Court on Tuesday upheld former Hsinchu City councilor Lee Huang Chin-yen’s (李黃錦燕) four-year sentence for corruption.
Investigators found that while in office, Lee, a member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), had over 10 years forged records and financial receipts so that she could pocket wages intended for office assistants.
She reportedly collected NT$10 million (US$333,267 at the current exchange rate) in total.
Initially a district court sentenced her to 10 years in prison.
After that, the case went to the High Court, which found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison, but she was later acquitted.
After another retrial, she was sentenced to four years in prison.
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