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HCCC 298/2017
[2018] HKCFI 2857
IN THE HIGH COURT OF THE
HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION
COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE
CRIMINAL CASE NO 298 OF 2017
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| Before: |
DHCJ Stuart-Moore |
| Date: |
18 July 2018 at 6.15 pm |
| Present: |
Mr Phil Chau and Mr Lai Ming, on fiat, for HKSAR |
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Mr Arthur Luk, SC and Mr Perry Chan, instructed by
K M Tang & Co, for the accused |
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Transcript of the Audio Recording
of the Sentence in the above Case
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COURT:
It seems from the defendant’s uncontrollable trembling after he had killed his wife by stabbing her deep into her body through her heart and liver that he realised immediately what a terrible thing he had done. But earlier in the incident it appears that the defendant had already stabbed her twice; once on the neck and once in the chest so deeply that the knife went up into her armpit.
The defendant aptly described the knife as the sort which is used to cut watermelons. It was a murderous weapon. He had removed it from the box where it was kept before using it on his wife. It does appear that the defendant has a bad temper.
There was, as the jury have found, nothing truly provocative in the legal sense about his wife’s desire to sell the Mainland property that they jointly owned. After all, she could not sell it without his signature to any sale contract. She had even tried to soften the argument, because in the course of their conversation she had offered to take the defendant out for a meal and to pay from her salary for him to have a massage. But the defendant has rightly described himself as a miser who only likes to save money and never to spend it.
Even though the defendant received from his sister every month the sum of $30,000, all he allowed his wife each month was $2,000. So it is no surprise that she decided to go out to work. And when she did, he revealed his possessive nature because he tried to persuade her not to. And in his words, he thought that she might be duped into leaving him if she worked outside the home. It is no wonder that the marriage was unhappy. But from what the defendant told the police, it is clear that he lays the blame for that very much on his wife, when the reality is that he was just as much to blame, and perhaps more so than she was.
Even after he killed his wife, when first pretending that he remembered nothing, he spoke about her struggling or them struggling and that he was struggling with her for the knife, and yet it was he who had taken it out of the box where it is kept. The defendant then tried to make out that he stabbed her by mistake, inadvertently. And he started calling her in the interview irritable and bad-tempered, and throwing herself at him.
Not only were you not provoked but the jury has seen through the evidence given by Dr Nip, who made out that the defendant at the time of the killing suffered from a disease known as panic disorder which he said substantially reduced the defendant’s responsibility at the time of the killing.
Dr Amy Liu, under whose care the defendant has been for at least 15 months and who had 27 consultations with the defendant during that time, as well as full access to the nursing records, was in the very best possible position to make a proper diagnosis. This compares with two relatively recent consultations between the defendant and Dr Nip which took a total of eight hours.
Dr Liu was in no doubt that Dr Nip had confused the symptoms of atrial fibrillation, from which the defendant has suffered since July 2016, with panic disorder which has very similar symptoms. Furthermore, Dr Nip had used a referral letter from Kwong Wah Hospital to the West Kowloon Psychiatric Clinic as a diagnosis of anxiety disorder, when it was plainly nothing of the kind. And in any event, anxiety disorder is not used by psychiatrists as a way of describing a particular disease. It is an umbrella term under which various diseases of an anxiety type are described.
On that referral letter the defendant had anxiety reaction which is not a disease and it should have been quite clear to Dr Nip that this was only a referral to the psychiatric clinic and no more. In any event, the defendant himself never attended the clinic. He was released on that particular day from the hospital as being mentally fit.
No doubt, the defendant was anxious about his many diseases which Mr Luk has just referred to. He had, amongst other things, hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol - hyperlipidaemia. But as Dr Liu said, there is no evidence that the defendant had progressed to the state of panic disorder. Not only had Dr Nip wrongly used the referral letter as a diagnosis to support his own diagnosis of panic disorder, he had also used a Taiwanese medical paper to confirm his diagnosis without disclosing to the jury that that paper he was relying on required further confirmation of those findings. And it can only be assumed that Dr Nip failed to make that important disclosure so as not to reduce the impact of the evidence which he was giving.
All was revealed when Dr Liu tracked down that piece of work and eventually she found it and she brought to our notice the very serious non-disclosure on the part of Dr Nip. In this regard, what Dr Nip had done was not only wrong, it was plain dishonest.
Would you stand, please. Mr Kwan, all in all, it appears that you have an extremely bad temper when you attacked your wife with that dreadful weapon. You just did not like her point of view and for this she has paid with her life. As you are well aware there is only one sentence for murder and you must go to prison for life.
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