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Supreme Court upholds 12-year sentence for Zhongshan Station killer

Supreme Court upholds 12-year sentence for Zhongshan Station killer

12-year sentence for MRT station killer upheld

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a ruling of the Taiwan High Court that sentences Kuo Yen-chun, convicted of randomly slashing four people at a Taipei Metro station last year, to 12 years in prison.

Kuo, 28, attacked people with a 20cm kitchen knife at MRT Zhongshan Station on July 21 last year, injuring four people. Kuo was suppressed by five security guards and the station chief after a few minutes’ face-off before police arrived to handcuff him and take him away.

Police said Kuo’s parents were divorced when he was a little child and Kuo had lived with his mother in Japan for a long time, but came back to Taiwan after his mother died of cancer.

Investigators said Kuo had been unemployed for a long period of time. He had a quarrel with his aunt one day after being hallucinated from taking drugs and left home; he later slept on public park benches, police said. He felt depressed and was filled with pent-up emotions, so he stole a knife from a store and went to the station to commit the crime, police said.
After he was caught, Kuo said, “If no one had stopped me, I would have killed all the people.”

Prosecutors asked for a severe sentence because Kuo wielded a knife to injure people just to release his pent-up emotions, causing great fear in the society and showing no remorse for his acts.

At the first trial, Taipei’s Shilin District Court found Kuo guilty of offenses of causing intentional injury to four people and sentenced him to three years in prison on Dec. 25 last year.

On May 12, the second trial in the High Court threw out the original sentence and convicted Kuo on two counts of the more serious offense of attempted murder and two counts of intentional injury, increasing his sentence from three years to 12 years.

The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which on Thursday upheld the second trial’s opinions and sentenced Kuo to 12 years in prison.