萬國法律事務所

In order to decrease the number of incidents of driving under the influence (DUI), Taiwan's Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 185-3 of the Criminal Code on 31 May 2019, which amendment stipulates that repeat DUI offenders who cause death may be sentenced to a maximum of life imprisonment.
 
Pursuant to the amended Section 3 of Article 185-3 of the Criminal Code, a person who has committed a DUI offense under this Criminal Code or Article 54 of the Criminal Code of the Armed Forces (陸海空軍刑法) and who has received a final ruling of guilty or given a deferred prosecution and, in addition, who again commits a DUI offense within five years, and such repeat offense results in death, the offender shall be sentenced to life imprisonment or imprisonment for not less than 7 years; if the offense results in serious physical injury, the offender shall be sentenced to imprisonment for not less than 5 years but not more than 12 years.
 
However, in the event that a repeat DUI offender’s DUI incident does not result in death or serious physical injury, the penalty remains unchanged and the original rules will apply.  According to the present section 1 of Article 185-3 of the Criminal Code, DUI offenders shall be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 2 years and may be fined in an amount of 200,000 NTD at the same time.
 
Additionally, the original amendment bill proposed by the Executive Yuan also suggested adding a section 4 to Article 185-3 of the Criminal Code.  Said section 4 stipulated that if a DUI offender intended to cause death (direct intent) or unintentionally caused a death, but, he/she was aware of the possibility of death and did not act against his/her will (indirect intent), such acts shall be deemed to constitute the offense of murder under the Criminal Code and the DUI offender could face the death penalty.  However, as some legislators believe that the above acts result in murder charges under the existing Criminal Code, the Legislative Yuan eventually dropped this proposal.