The Taichung District Court today sentenced 34 members of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Taichung chapter to sentences ranging from three months to one year and 11 months for forging signatures in last year’s recall movement.
All but two were suspended sentences.
The KMT called the convictions “outrageous,” saying the sentence was imbalanced for the relatively minor infraction and politically motivated.
Photo: CNA
The 34 defendants were charged with document forgery under the Criminal Code and contravening the Personal Data Protection Act (個人資料保護法).
The ruling may be appealed.
Chapter executive director Wu Kang-lung (伍康龍) was sentenced to one year and eight months and a further three months on two separate counts, plus a fine of NT$300,000 to be paid to the public treasury.
Chapter secretary-general Chen Chien-feng (陳劍鋒) was sentenced to one year and six months and three months on two separate counts, and ordered to pay NT$250,000.
The two defendants would have their civil rights stripped for two years, although both were granted a five-year probation period.
They declined to comment after the sentencing.
An additional 30 KMT members were sentenced to between one year and two months and three months in prison, suspended for two to three years.
Two staff members were sentenced to one year and nine months respectively, and were not granted suspended sentences.
The investigation concluded in June last year with 34 indicted.
The chapter in January last year decided to counter recall campaigns against KMT legislators in Taichung by targeting opposition legislators in a counter-campaign led by Wu, with Chen assisting, prosecutors said.
Wu proposed copying names from the KMT membership registry to mass-produce and forge recall petitions, with Chen complicit in the scheme, they said.
Wu and Chen also directed the 32 staff members to organize and rearrange the petitions to avoid identical handwriting appearing consecutively and avoid detection, they added.
The forms were then submitted to the Taichung Election Commission.
After the commission removed invalid entries, the chapter could not reach the required threshold for a first-stage recall proposal, and Wu and Chen ordered staff to continue forging documents, prosecutors said.
The chapter falsified a total of 4,258 signatures in the first stage of last year’s recall campaigns targeting DPP legislators Tsai Chi-chang (蔡其昌) and Ho Hsin-chun (何欣純), accounting for more than 70 percent of the signatures collected, they added.
Additional reporting by Shih Hsiao-kuang
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