A Taoyuan man on Monday was handed a nine-year prison sentence for setting his girlfriend on fire, while a New Taipei City man received a 14-year jail term for stabbing a romantic rival to death in another final ruling.
The Supreme Court upheld a verdict from an earlier retrial of a nine-year prison sentence for Taoyuan resident Tseng Hao-chiao (曾浩喬), 64, in an incident from October 2017 involving a dispute with his ex-girlfriend surnamed Lo (羅).
Tseng, who was married at the time and operating an illegal gambling den, was having an affair with Lo, 50, who owned a clothing store.
Investigators said that the two met through their businesses, and that Lo helped to collect money and look after the accounts at the gambling den.
That subsequently led to financial disputes, with witnesses testifying that they had heard the couple argue about money.
Those arguments culminated in Tseng pouring gasoline over Lo and throwing a lit match, which left her with 70 percent burns, including on her face, neck, chest and limbs.
Lo only survived the ordeal following lengthy medical treatment, investigators said.
In the first ruling, Tseng was convicted of attempted murder and given a 12-year prison sentence, which he appealed.
The High Court upheld the ruling, but Tseng again appealed, and in a retrial the punishment was reduced to a nine-year sentence.
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld that decision.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Monday also upheld a 14-year prison sentence handed to New Taipei City resident Tai Chien-hsiang (戴千翔), 68, for killing a man surnamed Tang (湯), 53, in an altercation over a woman.
Tai in 2018 met a Vietnamese woman surnamed Nguyen (阮).
He showered Nguyen with gifts and considered her to be his girlfriend, but she rejected his romantic overtures, investigators said.
Tai then learned that Nguyen was living with Tang and on March 25 last year he stabbed Tang in the chest with a shard of metal.
Tang died due to a severed artery and investigators were able to confirm what had happened based on CCTV footage.
In the first and second rulings, the court convicted Tai of murder and imposed a 14-year prison term, but Tai appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, claiming that he did not know the victim, who had rushed at him and impaled himself on the piece of metal.
The Supreme Court dismissed Tai’s claims and upheld the 14-year sentence.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift