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.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS