Appeal Court upholds life sentence for serial child murderer
The Appeals Court Tuesday upheld a life sentence for a serial child murderer in his 30s known only as “Nui”, or “Ting Tang”, for sodomising and killing a seven-year-old boy in Loei’s Wang Saphung district on November 10, 2013.
The defendant has not been identified by either a surname or registration number.
The court rejected the defence’s claim that the accused had been forced to confess, and a point about the lack of eyewitnesses, ruling that the confession had occurred in the presence of an attorney and carried sufficient weight.
The court also pointed out that the defendant had drawn six pages of maps that led police to the boy’s body.
In its ruling Tuesday, the court found Nui guilty of kidnapping a minor under 15, coercion, detaining him illegally, and raping and killing him as well as disposing of the body to conceal the crime, upholding the previous court’s sentence of life imprisonment.
A defence lawyer told reporters that he would appeal to the Supreme Court with the goal to set a new legal standard for evidentiary findings, adding that in this case the evidence was circumstantial, included hearsay testimony and the maps the defendant had drawn were unclear.
On November 17, 2015, the court of first instance initially sentenced the man to death but commuted it to life imprisonment due to his confession to police, although he denied the charges during the trial.
