CRIMINAL CASE NO. 363 OF 2009
COURT: I have to deal with you on your plea of guilty to an offence of wounding with intent. An allegation of attempted murder lies on the file. I will honour the pleas and I will not deal with you as if you intended to take the life of the victim. But this is a case where you clearly intended almost the next best thing because this was a very serious attack with a real risk of causing death.
It came about for the reasons which are set out in the Summary of Facts that has been read out in this court. I am not going to repeat all those facts back to you and I shall summarise for the purposes of the public part of sentencing by saying that, after a short marriage, your former husband had custody of your young daughter and you had access. That worked until he met and eventually married a new woman who became your victim in 2009.
On 14 occasions between March and May, you harassed the couple over believed, or real, it does not matter, wrongs that you consider had been done either to yourself or your daughter, especially over arrangements for access.
On 5 June, having purchased a 32-centimetre-long knife, you waited for the victim and when she arrived, after some words, you plunged it twice into her stomach. You also used the knife to cut her face. In an attempt to protect herself against your attack, she gripped the blade of the knife and suffered further injury to her hand, her tendons being severed.
The photographs that show her scars are distressing, though I remember that the large scar was one for an emergency laparotomy that was undertaken when they had to check if you had injured any of her internal organs.
A man called Chik Kok-keung, a member of the public, disarmed you at the scene. I shall deal with commending him later. But having been disarmed, you made no attempt to run and stayed there to take the consequences.
If this had been an attack in cold blood, I would have been looking at a starting point after trial of imprisonment of 10 to 12 years. But this was not done in cold blood. Over the months when that harassment had been taking place, you had been the subject of advancing mental illness.
I have a diagnosis from Dr Wu, a psychiatrist who was commissioned by the defence, who diagnosed major depressive disorder, a recognised psychiatric condition. His report speaks of a distress that could have caused suicide and an inner turmoil suffered without respite. It speaks of the pathologically depressed mood overriding reason and judgment, sapping your willpower to resist committing the crime.
It does help you that Mr Cahill can tell me about two efforts you made in those months to try and receive help, going to Harmony House and to a doctor because of your advancing condition.
After your arrest and in custody, you spent some six months in Siu Lam and a mixture of time and medication has cured the condition; you no longer suffer from it. It means you can write me a moving letter now that expresses real remorse and I accept that.
The public and the courts have to be wary of offenders excusing their conduct by relying on psychiatric conditions which, the fear is, may describe in fancy terms no more than giving in to ordinary criminal urges. That is one of the reasons why I called for a further report from the visiting psychiatrists to Siu Lam, independent men, well experienced in this field.
The report I had from Dr Fu agrees with the diagnosis of your own psychiatrist. This is a question I had him asked and he answered it in this way: if this had been a case of murder, would diminished responsibility have been available to you as a defence? His professional opinion was that it could have been.
As I have said to Mr Cahill in exchanges between Bench and Bar, one need not examine too closely what the cause of the mental condition may have been because the important part of his opinion is that there would have been substantial impairment of your mental responsibility for the crime. The report therefore provides significant mitigation for you and it results in a very dramatic reduction of the starting point I mentioned earlier.
This is not a case, of course, where you can expect your liberty because your responsibility was impaired, not extinguished. These courts have experience of bad attacks between spouses or separated spouses and the like, where depression and mental turmoil have mitigated otherwise wicked conduct.
There is no tariff for such cases but the general approach to sentencing in this area would allow me, having given you a third discount for a plea, to pass a sentence of 3 years’ imprisonment, and that is the sentence I pass upon you today.
I do not pretend it was an easy sentence to arrive at and I am very conscious that your victim may well think the sentence to be inadequate. Your treatment of her was wicked and she will bear the scars of it for the rest of her life. All I can say to her is that the injury she suffered was in part caused by your sickness.
That leaves this court with the difficult task of reflecting that in the sentence, because what this court seeks to do, and it is a very difficult job, is identify that part of your conduct which deserves punishment whilst not punishing you for that part of the conduct referable to mental sickness.
I would like the victim to know that it is the sickness, your mental sickness, that results in this sentence, and I want her to know that if it had not been for that, I would have sentenced you to 12 years’ imprisonment after trial.
The sentence is 3 years.