The High Court’s Tainan branch on Wednesday upheld seven out of eight sentences in a series of appeals relating to a submachine gun shooting during a local election campaign in Tainan in late 2022.
The only exception was the sentence of Lee Chi-han (李奇漢), which was overturned.
Although Lee was found not guilty in the first trial, the second trial convicted him of aiding and abetting threats against others.
Photo: Taipei Times
Lee was sentenced to one year in prison, a news release from the court showed.
Lee was found to have driven the gunman, Kung Hsiang-chih (孔祥志), who was his acquaintance, and helped him change clothes after the shooting, the court said.
The verdicts for the other people involved remained unchanged from the first trial at the Tainan District Court in February, which ranged from acquittals to sentences of up to 10 years, it added.
Although prosecutors believed Wang Wen-tsung (王文宗), the chairman of Ciji Temple in Tainan’s Syuejia District (學甲), was the mastermind behind the shooting, the district court only found him guilty of harboring a wanted fugitive.
Wang received a six-month sentence, which was commuted to a fine.
The court said it handed down the lighter penalty, as the prosecutors were unable to provide sufficient evidence that Wang had planned the shooting.
Meanwhile, a close associate of Wang, Hung Cheng-chun (洪政軍), was found guilty of being directly involved in the planning of the shooting and of recruiting Kung as a triggerman.
Hung received a sentence of 10 years in prison.
According to prosecutors, Kung on Nov. 10, 2022, conducted two attacks targeting properties owned by former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Central Executive Committee member Kuo Tsai-chin (郭再欽) and former independent Tainan City councilor Hsieh Tsai-wang (謝財旺).
Kung fired 58 shots at a business owned by Kuo and shot 30 rounds at the campaign headquarters of Hsieh’s daughter, Hsieh Shu-fan (謝舒凡), who was a DPP candidate for the Tainan City Council, they said.
Neither location was occupied at the time of the shooting, so no one was injured.
Hung and Kung fled to Chinese-controlled Fujian Province in November 2022 and were arrested by Chinese police on Jan. 18 last year.
They were repatriated to Taiwan in February of the same year.
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