Taiwan: cultivation-group leader's thirteen-year sentence for a member's son beaten to death in confinement

Proceedings

1. 2016-03-11 · convictions final

   Taiwanese courts; Supreme Court of Taiwan. After an eighteen-year-old member's son was accused of drug use in 2013, he was detained for roughly eighteen days at the group's compound, beaten with bamboo rods and hoses and starved, losing ten kilograms; the autopsy found no drugs and attributed death to prolonged abuse and malnutrition. On 11 March 2016 Taiwan's Supreme Court finalised the sentences: group leader Chen Chiao-ming thirteen years for unlawful detention resulting in death, the boy's mother Huang Fen-que four and a half years, and three core followers three years and eight months to four years. Chen was paroled in 2025.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• confinement ordered at the group's compound
• the victim's own mother enforcing the detention under the leader's authority