Those two counts relate to incidents on 29 July 2020 and another on 8 August, a week later, of 2020. Under Count 1, when a passenger in a taxi, you pointed a knife at the taxi driver and demanded cash. You fled with 2,000 in cash, two mobile phones and a car key. On 8 August, under Count 2, you did the same thing when you as a passenger in a taxi pointed a knife at the taxi driver and demanded he handed over all of his money. On that occasion, he gave you $3,000, a mobile phone and a car key. Both of those incidents, young man, were in the middle of the night.
You were arrested on 22 September and admitted immediately the two robberies. Under your video-recorded interview, you said that you had thrown away the knife on each occasion and then sold the mobile phones for several hundred dollars each, which you then spent.
You are 25 years of age and single. You have provided almost no information to the police for the purposes of your antecedent history.
Mr Chui has just told me that you live with your parents and siblings. You received an education up to Form 3, I know, and you have worked as a cook in a Japanese restaurant for eight years, earning $15,000 a month. And prior to your arrest, you had been a casual worker earning a daily wage of around $800.
You have a criminal record dating back to 2013 when you were just 17 years old. That was your first offence of dishonesty and you received DATC, presumably, because you were abusing drugs at the time. Just a few days later, you were actually again before the court for possession. So I see the connection there between the offending. I do not understand why those matters were not heard at the same time as they should have been but it appears that you received a concurrent period of DATC.
You came back before the court in 2018 when you were 21 for further matters of dishonesty and you received, quite rightly, a sentence of 12 months’ imprisonment. And I note that in order for that to be carried out, there was a warrant for your arrest that had to be executed. A month later, you were before the court for another matter of dishonesty. But this time, you faced 10 charges of theft for which you received a term of imprisonment of 10 months on each charge, to be served concurrently with each other but consecutively to the 12 months’ imprisonment I have just mentioned.
All three of these matters were before the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court and therefore I do not understand why they were not consolidated because they should have been. In any event, you were released from prison for that term of imprisonment on 25 May 2019. These offences were committed in July and August 2020, very close in time with one another and indicating that you would have continued to offend had you not been stopped.
Mr Chan, I read that at a time when I do know that you had subsequently gone on to commit further offences against taxi drivers, which I found out about for the first time today. So I was obviously in tune with the spree of offending which you undertook because I now know that in the following month, about a month or so later, you were caught on the 21st and 22nd, seeking to obtain a service, in fact, by deception, could be monies because you were using your bank card and pretending to pay for a journey when you had not actually effected a transfer of money for those journeys.
You clearly have a total disregard for taxi drivers and for the position they play in our society. And to make it worse, you then sought to obstruct the police in the execution of their duty no doubt when they sought to arrest you for your offending.
For some reason, you received police bail and you were not dealt with that until May of this year, at which time you were then charged, and Mr Chui tells me, then remanded because you had been remanded throughout, in any event, on the two matters of robbery. And I understand that yesterday, on 7 September of this year, you received 12 weeks’ imprisonment for those matters.
Offences committed against taxi drivers are very serious indeed. Taxi drivers of Hong Kong perform a public service. Like your grandmother and your grandfather, they are somebodies’ parents, brothers, sons, uncles, and we want to protect them against people taking the sort of action you did. They work anti-social hours so that other citizens of Hong Kong can feel safe travelling late at night. They place themselves in a vulnerable position because they have no idea who is getting into the cab and they have no idea that when you point a knife at them, you are not going to use it against them.
As far back as R v Li Lun Hoi which was unreported, CACC 1387/1983, it was considered by the court to be appropriate to adopt a starting point for sentence of 5 to 6 years for what was referred to as “normal taxi driver robberies”. I do not take the view that any robbery, any offence against the taxi driver, should be considered normal. They should not have to risk this every time they sit in their cab so that they can give everyone else a service, so we can function in Hong Kong.
So even though - and I do not wish to criticise Mr Chui - even though he says, “Well, this is not such a serious offence,” for the man sitting in that cab and a lot of our taxi drivers are mature and retired people, it is terrifying when somebody does what you did even if you never thought you would ever use that knife. They deserve our protection.
You are very lucky that they were not injured in any way. I have considered R v Tran Van Anh [1993] 2 HKCLR 122 and HKSAR v Hussain Shakil, CACC 387/2011, in which it was noted that a starting point of 7 years would not be inappropriate. In HKSAR v Ho Kwai Che, HCCC 364/2020, and that is a sentence I passed on somebody recently who put a cutter to a taxi driver’s neck during a robbery, I mentioned all of those cases and my view as to how taxi driver robberies in 2021 now should be viewed by anybody who thinks that they are about to make some easy money from vulnerable people.
But this was a knife and not a cutter, and you did not place it against the taxi driver’s neck. So I consider that the correct starting point in this case to be one of 6 years. And as the two offences were committed on different dates and were against different victims, then they should be served consecutively save for the issue of totality. And given that I take the view and I was right that this was a spree you were intent upon and no doubt would have continued if you had not been stopped for other offending, I consider the proper sentence after discount for your timely guilty plea is one of 4 years upon Count 1 and 4 years upon Count 2, 2 years of which will be served consecutively to the sentence at Count 1, making a total sentence of 6 years’ imprisonment.
That sentence of 6 years’ imprisonment, for the avoidance of any doubt, is to be consecutive to any sentence passed under TMCC 926/2021.