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.
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
Minister of Digital Affairs Lin Yi-ching (林宜敬) yesterday cited regulatory issues and national security concerns as an expert said that Taiwan is among the few Asian regions without Starlink. Lin made the remarks on Facebook after funP Innovation Group chief executive officer Nathan Chiu (邱繼弘) on Friday said Taiwan and four other countries in Asia — China, North Korea, Afghanistan and Syria — have no access to Starlink. Starlink has become available in 166 countries worldwide, including Ukraine, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, in the six years since it became commercial, he said. While China and North Korea block Starlink, Syria is not
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has
RSS