A Taichung elementary school baseball coach who was found guilty of 90 offenses, including forcible molestation, sexual assault and filming sexual videos of 32 children over a six-year period, was yesterday sentenced to multiple prison terms.
The Taichung District Court sentenced the coach, surnamed Sung (松), to seven years and 10 months in prison for each of seven counts of sexual assault against a minor under the age of 14, the court said in a statement.
Sung was also found guilty of 46 offenses of forcible molestation of a minor under the age of 14, each of which he was sentenced to three years and six months in prison, the court said.
Photo: Chang Jui-chen, Taipei Times
He was also found guilty of three separate crimes of opportunistic indecent assault by an adult against a child and sentenced to one year and six months for each incident, it said.
Sung was convicted of 34 instances of causing minors to be depicted in electronically generated sex-related content, and was sentenced to prison terms of seven years and two months, seven years and six months or eight years and six months for each crime, it said.
As there are pending lawsuits related to the case, the final cumulative sentence has not yet been determined, the court said.
The ruling can be appealed.
The case did not come to light until a parent filed a complaint in October last year.
Although Sung was convicted of molesting three young boys in 2004, the judge sentenced him to two years in prison, suspended for five years, because he had admitted to the offenses and reached settlements with the victims, court documents showed.
As a result, Sung served no time and was not placed on the Ministry of Education's sexual offenders list, the documents showed.
The Taichung elementary school failed to carry out regular background checks and so was unaware of Sung's record when it hired him as a baseball coach in 2018. He served in the position for six years.
In March, the Taichung District Prosecutors' Office charged Sung with forcible molestation, forcible sexual intercourse and child sexual exploitation.
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