R. v. WONG YAU HANG

MAGISTRACY APPEAL NO.1588 OF 1994

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF HONG KONG

(Appellate Jurisdiction)

____________

_________________

J U D G M E N T

_________________

1. The appellant was convicted on a plea of guilty to a charge of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. He now appeals against that sentence.

2. The brief facts were that the appellant and another man assaulted the complainant in a lift, inflicting facial injuries to the left eye, noise and right neck.

3. In mitigation it was said to the magistrate that the appellant had been assisting a friend who had the belief that his wife was having an extra marital affair with the complainant. The magistrate, in my view, quite rightly considered this to be a distasteful event in which the appellant and his friend had taken the law into their own hands, had trapped the complainant in a lift as part of a pre-planned assault. Those are, in my view, aggravating features of this case and the magistrate was right in taking these factors into account in imposing the sentence that he did. I do not consider that the sentence was in any way manifestly excessive or wrong in principle and the appeal is dismissed.