The Supreme Court last week upheld a High Court decision to sentence a man convicted of soliciting nude photographs from more than 80 underage girls to 104 years and two months in prison, with two other crimes remanded to a lower court for retrial.
The conviction and sentence are final and cannot be appealed.
Lin Ho-chun (林和駿), 26, was convicted of enticing 81 girls, some as young as eight years old, into taking nude and obscene photos and sending them to him using social media from May 2014 to July 2017, the Supreme Court said in its ruling on Thursday last week.
Photo: Yao Yueh-hung, Taipei Times
Lin was expelled from a post-graduate program at National Taiwan University’s College of Medicine when the allegations first surfaced in 2017.
After his arrest the same year, Lin was tried at the Taipei District Court, where he pled guilty to all charges and was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for contravening the Child and Youth Sexual Exploitation Prevention Act (兒童及少年性剝削防制條例).
In sentencing, the district court said that multiple contraventions of the same law were considered to be one offense.
However, in December last year, the High Court ruled that each solicitation for nude photos constituted a separate offense, and Lin had committed more than 80 contraventions of the act.
It sentenced him to 106 years and 10 months in jail, citing the large number of victims. That ruling was appealed.
The Supreme Court said that while it agreed with most of the High Court’s ruling, two alleged crimes involving one of the victims needed further review, and remanded those cases to the lower court for retrial.
The Supreme Court ruling also reduced Lin’s prison sentence by two years and eight months.
The High Court ruled that a 15-year-old girl accused Lin of luring her into sending him nude photos so that they could “enjoy each other’s bodies.”
Lin had used similar actions since 2014, employing a fake name and profile image to entice 81 underage girls to share nude photos with other child pornographers, the court said.
Citing the statements of several victims, the court said that once a girl sent the first photo, Lin would then solicit other pictures, threatening to expose their actions to their families and others if they refused.
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