CRIMINAL CASE NO. 199 OF 2012
COURT: I have to sentence you on your pleas of guilty in the Magistracy for four charges of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
The facts, which you admitted, reveal that it was on the evening of 2 October and in the early hours of 3 October that you attacked four separate people minding their own business walking the streets of Hong Kong.
The reason you did it was because you were in a psychotic state which followed your consumption of methamphetamine hydrochloride.
The injuries you caused those four innocent people seem to me a matter of random chance, the last one receiving the lightest injuries, which were lacerations; the second victim receiving very significant injuries because your knife stroke severed both muscle and nerve in his arm, causing severe functional problems.
The psychiatric reports I have upon you reveal that you have had an association with “Ice” that has lasted 10 years. It was causing you problems in April of 2010, when you were admitted to the psychiatric unit of Kowloon Hospital. You were then having auditory hallucination and persecutionary ideas. The psychiatrists are of the opinion at the time of these events, you were intoxicated and in a psychotic state due to the influence of methamphetamine.
You have pleaded guilty to wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and your counsel tells me, and I will accept, that the basis of that is that the intention was a drugged one. But nonetheless, with the law, an intent is an intent, and it is no comfort to a member of the public to know that he is injured by a man with a knife not for any desire to take his purse or carry out some act of revenge, but merely because he has lost his control through the voluntary consumption of powerful narcotics.
In crime generally where a psychotic state has overtaken a man’s undrugged rational processes, there can be mitigation, especially if that psychotic state arises through no fault of the wrongdoer. Whilst I remember this was not, in effect, a particularly conscious intention you had in the effect that it was a sober and balanced mind that wanted to achieve the object, the fact remains that you had the relevant intent, and the fact that it arose because you chose to take “Ice” obviously robs your case of the mitigation there might otherwise have been if it had arisen for any other reason.
The first psychiatric reports recommended a hospital order so that they could treat the psychosis that existed upon your admission to Siu Lam. Time has overtaken that, because you have been 10 months in custody there, and you now no longer need to be treated for the psychosis, and hence this court cannot make any sort of hospital order to deal with a problem that has now gone away.
What concerns courts in this situation is the risk that you pose to the public should you have your liberty again. The mischief of a drug like “Ice” is that it is powerfully addictive, and I am bound to say that I judge that there is a risk that you are going to take “Ice” again when you do have your liberty, and the court knows its effect upon you, and what has to be a priority in my sentence of you is the protection of the public against that eventuality.
Your moral culpability lies not in the, in effect, desire to actually wound. It lies in the taking of the drugs knowing the sort of effect they have upon you.
It is worthy of note that you have a criminal record. In 2004 there was an incident between you and your girlfriend with an offensive weapon. You went to prison for 6 months; and there was a similar sentence before that for an assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
Do not think I overlook those matters your counsel placed before me. I appreciate that the passage of time at Siu Lam has resulted in you conquering, temporarily, the psychosis.
At the root of the sentencing in your case, though, is the fear of its return in the event that you take the triggering factor, the methamphetamine hydrochloride.
I have to remember, when it comes to passing a sentence that protects the public, that I cannot, or it would not be right to, pass a sentence that was disproportionate to the actual crimes you have committed. I will treat the four cases arising out of one incident. They started in the evening of the first day and finished early in the morning of the next, and although the reports tell me you took drugs on more than one occasion in that time, it was one session of drug taking.
If the injury in the 2nd charge had been inflicted by a man intending to cause really serious harm and that had been done in a different context where the injury was desired and willed, then a starting point in the region of 7 to 7½ years’ imprisonment would have been appropriate.
I do not forget your frankness to the police and your plea of guilty, and that is rewarded with a one-third discount.
Accordingly, I pass the sentence that results in 5 years’ imprisonment on Count 2 in order to protect the public, and I limit it to that amount of time to make it proportionate to the crime itself.
So the sentence on Count 2 is 5 years.
The results of the woundings were less serious on the other three counts, Counts 1, 3 and 4, and there I shall pass a sentence of 3 years’ imprisonment. All of those sentences will run concurrently to each other.
The resulting sentence is one of 5 years.
I do not know what the future will hold when you are released, but you must realise, because the reports reveal you have some insight into your situation, that if you take “Ice” again, you risk a psychotic state, you risk a repetition of this sort of conduct, and the element of protecting the public should that happen would be much the greater next time, and you would risk a very long sentence.