23 November 2023 :

30 September 2023 :

The Hsinchu District Court on September 28, 2023 handed the death sentence to a man found guilty of arson that resulted in the death of eight family members in June last year.
The murders by Chen Yen-hsiang were cruel and evidence of the crime clear, the court said in a press release.
In the pursuit of justice and the preservation of social order, the death penalty was deemed necessary, and Chen was further stripped of his civil rights for life, the court said.
However, the ruling can still be appealed.
Chen, plagued by mounting debts and financial woes, often engaged in heated arguments with his parents, with whom he resided and ran a tire shop on Dongda Road in Hsinchu City, according to the court.
On the evening of June 15, Chen left home after quarreling with his parents and returned with 20 liters of gasoline, which he splattered across the tire shop located on the ground floor of a two-story building where the extended family lived, before igniting a fire using a lighter and tissues.
The fire quickly spread to the second floor.
Chen's father managed to escape the scene, but his mother was trapped while trying to alert other family members on the second floor, who all died in the fire, including Chen's wife and three children aged 7, 6 and 3, younger sister, sister-in-law and 1-year-old niece.
Chen deliberately set the fire, which caused the death of four innocent young children, simply because of quarrels over family matters and his belief that his parents were unfairly biased toward other siblings, the court said.
Chen was subsequently arrested and indicted for murder in August 2022.

23 March 2023 :

The Taiwan High Court Kaohsiung Branch Court on March 23, 2023 upheld the death sentence of a man who raped and murdered a Malaysian student of Chang Jung Christian University in Tainan in October 2020.
Speaking with reporters after the court issued its ruling, Chiu Ming-hung, chief judge of the hearing, said that the court had upheld Liang Yu-chih's sentence due to his lack of remorse or empathy for his 24-year-old victim, surnamed Chung, as well as his high risk of recidivism.
The ruling can be appealed.
On October 28, 2020, Liang abducted Chung while she was walking by herself along a railway overpass near her school around 8 p.m., according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors said that Liang then raped and strangled the Malaysian student with a length of rope before dumping her body in the mountainous Alian District in neighboring Kaohsiung City.
After receiving a missing persons report from Chung's university, police traced Liang as a suspect using CCTV and arrested him in Kaohsiung on October 29, 2020.
Liang, who confessed to the murder following his arrest, was sentenced to death by a district court on March 18, 2022.
According to the police, Liang had attempted to rape another person prior to murdering Chung.
The murder drew significant media attention in Malaysia, given that Chung came from a prominent local family in Sarawak.
Before the death penalty ruling from the lower court, Chung's parents had asked for "life for life" as the best justice for the victim.
In response to March 23 ruling, Chung's mother said in a social media post that justice had been served.
According to Malaysia's news media, Chung studied at Sibu Methodist Pilley Institute (MPI) from 2014 to 2017 on a three-year diploma course before transferring to Chang Jung Christian University for a three-year business management degree program.
The two schools have a sisterhood agreement in which students, upon finishing their courses at MPI, are transferred to Chang Jung Christian University for further study, the reports said.