The High Court’s Kaohsiung branch yesterday sentenced Lin Chin-kui (林金貴) to life in prison for killing a taxi driver in the city 13 years ago.
The retrial was a dramatic reversal of August 2018, when Lin was acquitted — his 2010 convictions and life sentence dropped — and he walked out of the courtroom a free man.
Lin, now 43, seemed shaken by the decision.
He quickly left the courthouse accompanied by members of the Taiwan Innocence Project (TIP), which has campaigned for him over the years, refusing to answer reporters’ questions.
“It is regrettable that today’s ruling found Lin guilty, as no objective evidence pointed to him being the killer,” TIP executive director Lo Shih-hsiang (羅士翔) said. “We will continue to stand up for his rights, and will appeal again to prove that he is innocent of this crime.”
Lin was investigated after a taxi driver surnamed Wang (王) was shot with a handgun at close range in Kaohsiung’s Fongshan District (鳳山) in May 2007.
A surveillance camera on the street captured a blurred image of a man with long hair and showed two people who saw the suspect’s face.
Five months later, a masseuse said a police sketch artist’s rendition resembled Lin, and he was taken in for questioning.
An investigation led to Lin being indicted for murder and illegal possession of a firearm.
The district court convicted Lin, but his case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
Lin has consistently said that he is innocent.
In 2014, TIP members began to campaign for Lin’s innocence, after he and his family continued to question the prosecutors’ evidence and the witnesses’ reliability.
In April 2017, TIP filed a third appeal on Lin’s behalf after his sister found a photograph, reportedly taken two months before the taxi driver’s murder, in which Lin had short hair.
After reviewing the new evidence, the High Court gave its approval for a retrial and released Lin from prison until the new ruling.
By that time, Lin had served close to nine years of a life sentence.
In the August 2018 retrial, the High Court’s Kaohsiung branch acquitted Lin of murder and illegal possession of a firearm, after the defense introduced doubt into the evidence and the eyewitness accounts.
At the time, the TIP and Lin’s family hailed it as a major victory, saying that a wrongly accused man had been saved from a life in prison.
Lin’s lawyer, Yeh Chien-ting (葉建廷), said that the case, out of all of the cases that the TIP has taken up, presented the most obvious flaws in the witnesses’ identification of the suspect.
“We hope the justice system acknowledges that flaws in suspect identification were the major reason for the wrongful conviction,” Yeh said.
However, prosecutors filed an appeal, which finished last year by the Supreme Court ordering another retrial at the High Court, resulting in yesterday’s guilty ruling.
New information provided by prosecutors was the key in overturning the acquittal.
Several people testified to seeing Lin with unkempt long hair around the time of the 2007 murder, when he was out on parole after serving time for a petty crime.
A forensic examination also cast doubt on the date of the photograph supplied by Lin’s sister.
Prosecutors also pointed to new testimony from Lin’s two cellmates, who alleged that Lin had admitted to the killing and told them what had happened.
In January last year, Lin was arrested for breaking into a woman’s home in Taichung, stealing her car keys and driving her Mercedes-Benz sedan to Tainan.
Based on video footage as well as saliva from beverage containers in the car that matched Lin’s DNA, he was in May last year convicted of car theft and sentenced to six months in prison.
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