CRIMINAL CASE NO. 110 OF 2010
COURT: The defendant, Wong Lau-hing, was charged with murder, contrary to Common Law and punishable under Section 2 of the Offences against the Person Ordinance, Cap. 212. The defendant pleaded not guilty to murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter by reason of provocation. The prosecution did not accept his plea to the lesser offence. After the trial, the jury found the defendant guilty of murder.
The facts disclose that the defendant and Wong Lau-hing, the deceased, were co-tenants of a flat, situated on the 3rd Floor of No. 11 Yiu Tung Street. The two were occupying rooms opposite each other across a corridor at the end of the flat with a window in between them.
There was no dispute that at around 9 pm, on 21 October 2009, the defendant suddenly appeared outside room 11, that is the mahjong room, and announced to the mahjong players inside that he had chopped someone. The person chopped by the defendant was the deceased. The deceased was in critical condition when the ambulance men attended to him. Despite emergency treatment, the deceased was certified dead at 2.25 pm on 22 October 2009.
The defendant admitted having chopped the deceased. Though the defendant claimed that he did not know how many blows he inflicted on the deceased, there was no dispute that Dr Ng, the forensic pathologist, found a total of 169 cut wounds on the deceased when he conducted the autopsy. Many of these blows were inflicted on the deceased’s head, neck and upper body. Two of the blows to the deceased’s head penetrated the skull. The cause of death was multiple cut wounds. The deceased literally bled to death.
As to why the defendant chopped the deceased at the time, according to the defendant, he was disturbed again by the deceased making squeaking noise with the window. When he reasoned with the deceased, the deceased denied having disturbed him and scolded him. The defendant said that the deceased attacked him first with fists and a stool and he attacked the deceased with the chopper afterwards.
From the defendant’s own evidence and from the antecedent statement, the defendant is a man of clear record before. At the time of the offence, he was 70. He is now 72, and I heard that he used to work as a garment worker and retired in 1997. This is a tragic case. A 70-year-old old man killed another even older man, 74 years old.
As the defendant is not someone under the age of 18, under the law, upon conviction of murder, there is only one sentence I can pass. For the offence of murder, the defendant is sentenced to life imprisonment.