For nearly 10 months Taipei prosecutors have ignored a rape case that could have led to the indictment of one of the alleged murderers of Wu Hsiao-hui (吳曉蕙), a preliminary school teacher killed in 1994.
Huang Chi-feng (黃啟峰), one of two men who reportedly confessed to killing Wu, allegedly raped a Canadian woman on Oct. 21. Though the incident was reported to police and Huang was identified by the woman, Huang has yet to be arrested or detained for her assault.
"I wanted to press charges, but nobody would listen," said the woman, whose identity will not be disclosed in order to protect her privacy.
The woman is critical of the way police handled her case and frustrated that prosecutors never bothered to prosecute Huang.
Nearly 10 months after she was raped, she has still not been contacted by a prosecutor.
Recently, Wu's murder has prompted calls for a national finger-printing regime and tougher penalties for juvenile offenders -- both suspects in the 1994 murder were juveniles at the time -- but the woman told the Taipei Times that the problem is not the laws, but apathy toward enforcement.
"If they're talking now about protecting women under the law, they have to look at who's doing the protecting. It's supposed to be the police, but they didn't protect me," she said.
Lin Shu-chia (
"By law, police officers don't have the right to pull out their handcuffs to arrest somebody immediately if this person doesn't break the law in front of police officers," Lin explained.
But according to Lin, after the precinct accepted the case and began the paperwork, officers tried to wrap up the process as soon as possible with the woman identifying Huang as the suspect. They then transferred the case to Shihlin District Prosecutors' Office within a week.
"When she reported to us, there was no witness for this case. We handled it according to the statement of the victim. It's a simple rape case, I must say," he added.
Shihlin District Prosecutors' Office Prosecutor-General Wu Chen-huan (
Though the Canadian woman's case has not progressed in the courts, DNA samples and fingerprints resulting from the case were recently used to tie Huang to Wu Hsiao-hui's murder eight years ago.
The Canadian woman's case is also the only case that could tie Huang to a criminal act as an adult.
Wu said that since Huang was 22 at the time of the Oct. 21 incident, he would face full criminal responsibility if indicted.
"For the former Hsinu Elementary School teacher Wu Hsiao-hui's murder, he was only 15 when he [allegedly] committed the crime, so he was under the protection of the Law Governing the Disposition of Juvenile Cases (
Huang could receive a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison for Wu Hsiao-hui's murder, rather than life imprisonment or the death penalty were he an adult.
He could receive an additional seven years if convicted of raping the Canadian woman.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
RSS