The Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling on Thursday and sentenced a landlady to 22 months imprisonment for negligent homicide over an apartment arson in New Taipei that killed nine people almost five years ago.
The ruling against the woman, identified by her last name Lien (?), is final and cannot be appealed, the Supreme Court said.
Having been sentenced to two years in 2018 for negligent homicide for the deadly fire, Lien had filed an appeal with the High Court in January this year, which reduced her jail sentence to 22 months, in consideration of her having provided monetary compensation to some of the victims’ family members.
Unhappy with the jail sentence, she then filed another appeal, but her appeal was dismissed by the Supreme Court on Thursday, which maintained the lower court’s ruling.
The arson occurred in November 2017, when a man named Li Kuo-hui (???), an ethnic Chinese from Myanmar, deliberately set Lien’s apartment building in Zhonghe District on fire.
On Nov. 22 that year, Li went out with an empty bottle which he filled with gasoline, returned to the apartment building and doused the fuel on the staircase to the third and fourth floors, ignited it, and fled.
The blaze quickly spread, and Li’s tenants who had been living on the fourth and fifth floors in partitioned rooms were killed, police said at the time.
According to the New Taipei District Court in its ruling in 2018, Li set the fire out of anger because he claimed to have heard other tenants making fun of him from his rented room in the building.
He was subsequently found guilty of murder with direct intent, and sentenced to death.
Regarding Lien’s liability in the case, the district court also handed her a two-year prison sentence for negligent homicide, mainly because it was found that she had previously ignored advice given by the New Taipei Architects Association to make safety improvements on her property and went ahead with renting out rooms to tenants.
According to a court document, Lien purchased two Zhonghe apartment buildings in 2015 that were joined together, then broke their inner walls without proper authorization to make them into a larger space in order to partition it into a total of 41 rooms.
The deaths of the nine people were in part due to her negligence, due to the lack of fire safety equipment installed in the apartment floors, the court said.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel