Schedium

Today (March 6) a court in New Taipei City sentenced Zheng Jie (鄭捷) to the death penalty . Last year Zheng killed 4 people and injured 22 in a knife attack in the Taipei Metro. On May 21, 2014, Zheng had boarded a train of the Taipei Metro in Longshan Station. After the train departed, he went on a stabbing spree. The terrorized passengers were trapped for a few minutes inside the train.  During the interrogations following his arrest, Zheng admitted that the knife attack was premeditated. He said that he had chosen Longshan Station because the distance to the next stop, Jiangzicui Station, was longer than the average. This allowed him to kill as many people as possible.

Every time a crime is perpetrated, the media find themselves in a difficult position. On the one hand, they have the responsibility to spread knowledge, inform and analyse. On the other hand, they are a business that must make money out of the news they report on. They are easily tempted to speculate on the suffering and the misfortunes of people, to turn them into entertainment.  The Taipei Metro knife attack that happened a few days ago is such a tragic and sad event that I think everyone should be careful not to use this massacre as a pretext to speculate and fabricate theories that try to explain why Zheng Jie committed that crime. The most absurd of such theories is that the Sunflower Movement made society more violent and therefore encouraged individual acts of ferocity such as Zheng Jie's. These ideas can't be taken seriously, as they completely lack evidence and are nothing more than insinuations. The murder of four people should not be used as an instrument to fi