The Queen v. Yip Yu Lun

CACC000344/1986

BETWEEN

Coram: Hon. Cons, V.-P., Silke & Kempster, JJ.A.

Date of hearing: 31st December, 1986.

Date of delivery of judgment: 31st December, 1986.

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JUDGMENT

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Cons, V.-P. delivered the judgment of the Court:

1. The Applicant ("Defendant") was convicted before His Honour Judge Daniell, sitting as a Deputy Judge of the High Court, and a jury on two counts of murder.

2. The two murders were committed in a but in Yuen Long on the 26th November last year. The victims were a husband and wife to whom the Defendant owed quite a large sum of money. They were pressing him for repayment and he decided to kill them. On his own confession he made an appointment to have tea with them. There he took the opportunity to drug them with sleeping pills and took them to the hut in Yuen Long where he killed them. He stove in the head of the husband and he strangled the woman. He buried them under the kitchen floor. He had taken the hut in Yuen Long a month before for that very purpose, and he had dug a hole in the floor ready for his victims.

3. That is a very brief outline of the events. They are recorded in full detail in the statements given by the Defendant to the police as soon as he was apprehended. That was when he was in the final act of cementing the two bodies into the kitchen floor and neighbours, whose suspicions had already been aroused by his conduct, notified the police.

4. Mr. Sarony, who now appears for the Defendant, informs us that in his view there are no possible grounds of appeal. The Defendant's own grounds of appeal, contained in his original application for leave, put forward in effect that the judge had not put his case correctly to the jury, and that the judge had conducted himself during the trial in such a way as to exhibit a feeling against the Defendant. Mr. Sarony says that he is unable to support those grounds. The Defendant does not wish to pursue them himself and we ourselves can find no support in the record or the summing-up.

5. There is only one short passage in the summing-up which has given us a slight cause for concern. That occurs at p.345 of the Bundle. The judge was dealing with the possibility that the Defendant had been too drunk to form the intention to kill. He suggested to the jury that if the Defendant had formed the intention to kill sometime in advance, even as long as two months, but nevertheless on the night in question was too drunk to form an intention, the law would still hold him guilty. With respect that is not correct. However in our view he put the situation right soon afterwards by the correct direction which appears on the next page of the summing-up. In any event the evidence was so overwhelming against the Defendant that we would have had no hesitation in applying the proviso.

6. For these reasons the application for leave to appeal is refused.

Representation:

Neville Sarony (D.L.A.) for Applicant

H. Macleod, Crown Counsel for Respondent