CRIMINAL CASE NO. 24 OF 2009
COURT: I have to sentence you in respect of three charges of an indecent assault and two charges of incest to which you pleaded guilty in the Magistrates Court.
The victim in each charge was your daughter. She was born in 1995. At the time of the first indecent assault, she was aged 8 years. The charges proceed temporally, by way of time. The last charge occurred when she was 12 years old. Charges 2 and 5 are by far the most grave because you there pleaded guilty to incest. In relation to Charge 2, she was 11, and in relation to Charge 5, she was 12. Charges 3 and 4 are indecent assaults occurring whilst she was also 12 years of age.
The gravity of that conduct is obvious and I know that you well appreciate it. The damage to your family, and especially to your daughter, is obvious. The mischief of incest is that it does strike at the fabric of family life and, of course, creates great conflict in the victim who has to cope with the violation of what should have been the natural relationship of affection between father and daughter.
I note that, on the occasions when you had sexual intercourse, you used a condom. There is no aggravation of pregnancy. There was no physical force, no bribes, no threats. The indecent assaults were not grave ones. I will accept that this was a case that arose from a background of some genuine affection and was not a cynical sexual exploitation, and I do accept that you are truly remorseful.
It is submitted to me that there is still hope for the family and I have seen evidence of that in the letters given to me.
Perhaps the most significant mitigation is the fact that you pleaded guilty and you did so at the earliest stage. I will accept that you made a conscious decision to spare your daughter the further damage of you seeking to deny what she told the social workers and, of course, that conduct by you has spared her having to give evidence and that is something for which you will get real credit.
It seems to be unrealistic to try and divide this conduct up into different slices of criminal behaviour and to work out individual sentences on each count. I suspect criminal judges over the years have always stood back and looked at the overall criminal conduct that has been exhibited between you and your daughter, and that is what I do here.
I shall take a starting point for basically what you did as one of 9 years’ imprisonment. You earn a third discount by reason of the matters I have mentioned. That results in a sentence of 6 years’ imprisonment and that will be the sentence I pass on Charges 2 and 5. For the indecent assaults, I shall pass sentences of 14 months on Charges 1, 3 and 4.
The mitigation that I very briefly summarised, in that summary did little credit to the very fine mitigation I had from your counsel. It is not limited just to that third, it goes beyond that because when I look at the totality of the sentence, I engage that mitigation by making all of those sentences concurrent to each other.
Sometimes judges give more than a third discount in an individual case because the girl has been spared giving evidence. In effect, I have not done that here because I have given you that credit by the way I dealt with totality.
Finally, what I wish to say in front of you and in the presence of your counsel is that I had more in mind before I heard his very fine mitigation. I have been doing this job a long time at different levels and there are only a handful of mitigators in Hong Kong who would have done the job he did for you.