HKSAR v. NGAI WAN FAT

DCCC55/2009

IN THE DISTRICT COURT OF THE

HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION

CRIMINAL CASE NO. 55 OF 2009

----------------------

----------------------

Reasons for Sentence

1.  Defendant, you have pleaded guilty to an offence of theft, and that theft was one of pickpocketing.  You have admitted that on the 17th day of December 2008, outside Shop No. M5, Ground Floor, Pei Ho Street Market, Sham Shui Po, Kowloon, you stole one wallet, one Hong Kong ID card, one home visit permit, one Octopus card, one supermarket membership card, four red pockets and cash of $500 Hong Kong currency, the property belonging to Wong Hon-lung.

2.  At about 11 am on 17 December 2008, a police officer was on patrol at the market in Pei Ho Street, Sham Shui Po.  He saw you, the defendant, approach a female from behind outside the shop in the market and witnessed you had unzipped her bag that she was carrying at the time and took out a wallet from the bag.  You then turned around and left.  The officer intercepted you outside the market and recovered the wallet from you.  The police officer arrested and cautioned you, and under caution, you said, “Ah sir, I have no money to buy meal, so I stole the wallet from the old lady.”

3.  The lady positively identified the wallet as her lost property with all the contents as I have said that were in the charge.

4.  Mr Wong, your solicitor, has mitigated on your behalf this morning, and I have taken into account all that he has had to say.  You are 51 years of age, married, and have a daughter aged 14 and wife in China.  You are unemployed and are waiting for CSSA approval.  Mr Wong has told this court that your wife has incurred heavy debt in the PRC in view of your daughter’s blood disease of some RMB70,000.  You therefore desperately needed money to finance the indebtedness and of course to support yourself as you were unemployed and therefore committed this offence.  Most importantly, Mr Wong says that you admitted the offence right at the outset to the police officer and of course have pleaded guilty before this court.

5.  You have 25 previous convictions involving 30 different counts.  Four of those offences are for pickpocketing and one is for attempted pickpocketing.  Your last conviction was in September 07 for two offences of theft, to which you were sentenced to 21 months in total in the District Court again on pickpocketing charges.

6.  The guidelines for pickpocketing were laid down in a case, in HKSAR v Ngo Van Huy [2005] 2 HKLRD 1.  It is clear that for first offenders of pickpocketing, the guideline sentence of 12 to 15 months after trial is appropriate.  Account, however, must be taken of the existence of any aggravating or mitigating features.  Of those aggravating features, in this case it is that this offence was committed in a place in which the public is at particular risk such as this place where it was a crowded market.  The other aggravating factor is of course the fact that you are a repeat offender or at least a persistent one. 

7.  For this offence, Defendant had I convicted you after trial, I would have taken a starting point of 15 months’ imprisonment.  In view of your past record and you being a persistent and a repeat offender, that is an aggravating factor to which I shall add a further 9 months’ imprisonment, and the fact that this offence was committed in a crowded area, I shall add a further 3 months’ imprisonment.  Therefore, the total sentence, had I convicted you after trial, would have been 27 months’ imprisonment.

8.  I give you the full discount of one-third as you have pleaded guilty before me, and the sentence is therefore reduced to 18 months' imprisonment, to which you are so sentenced.