Chau Ming-cheong v. The Queen

CACC001011/1982

Headnote

Manslaughter - child battering - husband and wife charged with murder - plea guilty to manslaughter accepted - case for Crown against husband be set on his standing by in breach of duty to care for and protect welfare of his child - attempt to withdraw plea on ground that agreed faith to which husband had pleaded did not discharge the offence - agreement that act of mother causing death made her solely responsible rejected - Stone & Dobinson (1977) 64 Cr. App. R. 186 Applied - Application refused.

BETWEEN

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Coram: Hon. McMullin, V.-P., Li and Silke, JJ.A.

Date: 30th March 1983.

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JUDGMENT

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McMullin, V.-P. :

1. The applicant Chow Ming-cheong and his wife, Ng Lai-king were jointly charged in the first count with the murder of their daughter Chau Pui-man and in the second with the ill-treatment of that child - the particulars being that they both wilfully assaulted the child-contrary to the provisions of s.27(l) of the Offences Against the Person Ordinance, Cap. 212.

2. The Crown accepted, and the court approved, pleas of guilty to manslaughter on the part of both defendants and the Crown offered no evidence on the second count whereupon they were acquitted of the statutory offence. The wife has not applied for leave to appeal.

3. Initially, the husband, Chau Ming-cheong, applied for leave to appeal against sentence and perfected grounds of appeal, drafted by counsel, were filed on his behalf upon the 6th December 1982. At the hearing of the appeal, however, Mr. van Buuren applied for an extension of time to make an application for leave to appeal against conviction, grounds of appeal in support of that application and of the application for leave having been filed on the 7th December 1982.

4. The basis of these applications is that the body of agreed facts put before the court and to which the applicant pleaded guilty, were insufficient to found a conviction for manslaughter.

5. Although one of the grounds of appeal as originally framed seemed to suggest that the applicant had been prevailed on by his lawyer to plead guilty to manslaughter although he was reluctant to do so, we were assured by Mr. van Buuren that the true purport of that ground was that the appellant had pleaded guilty upon advice given by his lawyer based upon a misunderstanding by the latter of the law as applied to the agreed facts - a misunderstanding subsequently shared by the trial judge.

6. At the outset of his address, Mr. Mason-Parker queried the right of this court even to entertain these applications in view of the plea of guilty. We were satisfied however that the applicant's complaint before us amounted to the proposition that the judge had erred in law in accepting the plea upon the agreed facts and that this case was thus indistinguishable from cases such as Forde (1924) 17 Cr. App. R. 99 and the other cases noted in Archbold (41st Ed. p.232, para. 4-58) in which the courts have held that such a mistake is sufficient ground for declaring the plea a nullity and quashing the conviction. It is clear that the applicant is entitled to challenge the propriety of the plea on the grounds advanced.

7. The only question with which we are concerned is whether there is substance in those grounds which are conveniently summarised in the tenth paragraph of the second ground in the following terms:

8. The applicant Chau Ming-cheong is aged 29 years. At the time of his arrest he was employed as a lorry driver earning about $3,000 per month. In 1977 he married Ng Lai-king, the defendant in the case, who is now about 26 years of age. Shortly after the marriage she bore to him twin girls one of whom was Chau Pui-man, the victim named in the indictment. It is common ground that this child died in the United Christian Hospital on the 6th February 1982 as a result of injuries inflicted on her by her mother. The actual cause of death was peritonitis supervening upon rupture of the small intestine.

9. There were no less than 148 external injuries, mainly bruises and abrasions of varying sizes and descriptions all over the body but including some small superficial wounds as well. In the opinion of the pathologist, 113 of these injuries were less than 4 days old. The greater part of the remaining 35 were less than 2 days old but some of these might have been as old as 7 days and & very few - mainly healing scars - could have been older, the estimates varying from 2 weeks to a couple of months.

10. All of these injuries, including the rupture of the intestine, resulted from beatings inflicted upon the child by her mother. It was accepted that the beatings had included the kicking of the child by her mother both on the morning of the 6th February and on earlier occasions. The rupture of the intestine was likely to have been caused, in the doctor's opinion, "by a heavy blunt force applied to the abdomen".

11. These latest injuries were but the latest manifestation of a long and dreadful history of ill-treatment extending back several years to the time when the child was in its earliest infancy. It is, however, conceded by the Crown that this applicant never himself took part in any of the grossly excessive physical punishments inflicted upon the child by her mother. The Crown does not dispute that he may occasionally, as he claims, have remonstrated with his wife about her behaviour, even possibly to the extent of suggesting divorce on one occasion.

12. The Crown bases its case against him on the proposition that he connived at his wife's unlawful behaviour by passively standing by and doing nothing to observe his duty as a parent to protect the child from assaults which he must have realised were wholly unjustified by reason of their frequency and severity or by taking any other reasonable steps to see that the welfare of his child was ensured whether by removing her from her mother's custody or otherwise.

13. Mr. van Buuren has put his argument for the applicant in various ways but these several submissions are seen in the end to rest upon a single contention, viz., that the injury which ruptured the intestine and caused the child's death must have resulted from some form of violence which wholly exceeded anything which had gone before that and that his client cannot be held responsible since it was not part of the agreed facts that he had been present as a witness to any such exceptional behaviour. He submits that upon this view, however guilty of dereliction of fatherly duty the applicant may have been at various times in the course of this unfortunate child's life, all that earlier course of conduct on the part of his wife becomes irrelevant. In other words, counsel relies on the agreed facts as disclosing what was described by the appellate court in Anderson v. Morris as an "overwhelming supervening event which is of such a character that it will relegate into a matter of history matters which could otherwise be looked upon as causative factors" (Anderson v. Morris (1966) 50 Cr. App. Rep. 206 at page 223).

14. Clearly this would be the case if the assault which caused the child's death had been inflicted by some means which wholly departed from anything which had previously occurred, as, for example, if the mother had suddenly used a knife to stab the child or a heavy club to strike her on the head. On the agreed facts it is likely that the applicant was not present when the fatal injuries were inflicted but a brief look at the agreed facts will show how little relevant that could have been to the case which the Crown was prepared to put before the jury.

15. The dislike evidenced by the mother for this twin became evident at an early stage in the latter's life. When the twins were some 4 or 5 months old they were placed for a time in the care of another person because the mother was then working. After 5 or 6 months however this foster mother could no longer keep them and the weaker of the two was retained by the mother while the stronger twin - the deceased - was put in the care of the husband's parents. There she remained until February 1980 when at the age of 2 years and 10 months she was returned to the mother.

16. There is nothing whatsoever to suggest that up to this time she had not been a well cared for and happy child. It was however only a week after her mother had resumed care of the child that, upon a visit by the grand parents, marks of bruises were seen upon the child's face. The grandmother took the child back to her own home but a month later she was returned again to her mother.

17. A few days after that the grandmother once again saw fresh multiple bruises on the child's body and she reported the matter to Wongtaisin police station. The wife was warned by the police and the child was retained for a while by the grand parents who enlisted the assistance of an organisation known as Against Child Abuse.

18. In August 1980 the child was returned to her parents so that she and her sister could go to kindergarten together. On two occasions in that month the headmistress of the kindergarten saw injuries upon the child and warned the mother that she should not chastise a child in such a manner. The headmistress noted further injuries on two occasions in September and at the instigation of the child's grandfather, who was summoned, the applicant went to Wongtaisin police station but upon his saying that he did not wish to take action against his wife, the report of the grandfather was cancelled. On this occasion the child was examined in Queen Elizabeth Hospital and found to have multiple bruises and lash marks and scratch marks on her face and body. Police referred the matter to the Social Welfare Department and the child was kept in hospital until 13th November and then returned to her mother's custody.

19. She and her sister then went to another kindergarten in the next few weeks during which the parents were receiving counselling from social workers both from Queen Elizabeth Hospital and the Against Child Abuse Society. The parents however neglected to take the deceased back to the hospital for follow-up as they had been told to do and her father only took her to the hospital on the 31st December when directly summoned by the doctor in charge of the case. On this occasion she was once more found to be suffering from fresh bruises and scratch marks and abrasions all over the body.

20. Consequent upon this examination the mother was charged with cruelty under s.27 of the Offences Against the Person Ordinance, Cap. 212. She pleaded guilty upon the 15th January but was not sentenced until 24th February when she was conditionally discharged and bound over in the sum of $500 to be of good behaviour for 18 months. The recognizance then entered into bound both parents to observe proper care and guardianship. It was also directed by the court that the child be placed under the supervision of the Social Welfare Department for a period of three years and that the wife should undergo psychiatric treatment.

21. However, between the 31st December and the 24th February the deceased and her sister had been attending the Lok Fu Caritas Kindergarten and the headmistress of that school noticed on the 26th and 29th January and again on the 2nd and 3rd of February that Pui-man had fresh bruises and swellings and abrasions upon her face and body. "The tragic and extraordinary fact is -and this is conceded - that even while she was waiting to come up for sentence, the mother had continued to batter her child. When on two further occasions, the 26th March and the 29th March, the headmistress saw further signs of injury she reported to Sanpokong Social Welfare office and issued a warning to the wife that she should not treat her child. in such a manner. The child was then put by the Social Welfare Department in the care of her aunt, the applicant's sister, at Lok Fu Estate where she remained until the 22nd of December 1981 when she returned once more to the custody of her parents.

22. On the 24th January the two children were taken by their parents to visit the grand parents and the grand parents noticed that the victim once more showed signs of bruising on her face, arms and legs. The applicant admitted that some of these injuries had been caused by his wife but he maintained that some had been the result of- a fall. When interviewed after the death of the child, the applicant admitted that on the morning of the 6th February he had seen his wife once more beat and kick Pui-man. He admitted that he had seen her do this on other occasions. It was said  his behalf by Counsel after taking instructions that the beating witnessed on the morning of the 6th was not a severe beating. The applicant admitted however that he did not dare to take her to school that morning because of the bruising shown upon her body. He went to work but returned home at about 11 a.m. to discover that Pui-man seemed to be very unwell. In a belated show of concern, the.-parents bought some aspirin and gave it to the child This did nothing to alleviate her condition. About noon her complexion went green and she seemed to stop breathing. She was then taken to hospital where she was found to be without heartbeat.

23. As a pathetic conclusion to this terrible history it may be noted that the expert and zealous care which she then received succeeded for a brief time in restoring the beartbeat and the devoted endeavour to preserve her life persisted for several hours. It was to no avail and she died at 6:45 p.m. that day.

24. It seems likely that the malice evidenced by the mother for one of her twins may have originated with the child's apparently happy sojourn in the care of her grand parents in the early years of her life. It was accepted by the Crown that the wife had from the outset of the marriage been on bad terms with her husband's parents who, it appears, despised her because she had become pregnant before marriage. Psychiatric reports which were before the court suggest that the dislike which the wife felt for her parents-in-law was displaced towards the child whose predicament was disastrously worsened by the inadequacy and weakness of the father who seemed unable either to stand up against the grand parents on behalf of his wife or against his wife on behalf of the child.

25. All the distresses and dissatisfactions which the child's mother may have felt in respect of her marriage appear thus to have been directed at the person of the unfortunate child who became in effect the innocent object of a prolonged campaign of vengeance on the part of her mother. That something of the sort occurred is evidenced by the fact that it has never seriously been suggested that anything in the child's conduct merited punishment even of a legitimate kind. The only causes for these beatings ever mentioned seem to have been bedwetting and vomiting, phenomena which may very well have resulted from the appalling treatment the child was receiving.

26. This melancholy recital makes it plain that the applicant was gravely deficient in his duty to maintain, insofar as it lay within his power, the safety, happiness, health and welfare of his child.

27. Of the cases cited to us, unquestionably the most helpful is Stone & Dobinson (1977) 64 Cr. App. R. In that case, Stone and his mistress Dobinson had elected to take care of Stone's sister who was suffering from anorexia nervosa, was eccentric and spent most of her time confined to her room. She was supplied with food which mostly she refused and the appellant's mistress, Dobinson, endeavoured to wash her with the aid of a neighbour. The defendants had been advised by a friend to seek the help of a doctor but the sister refused to give her doctor's name and Stone was unable to obtain his own doctor to see her. Some three weeks after Dobinson had last attempted to wash her, the sister died. The cause of death was toxaemia, resulting from infected bed sores due to prolonged immobilisation in bed and lack of food. She would probably have survived if she had obtained medical care.

28. The jury were directed that they had to consider the circumstances in relation to each of the defendants according to that defendant's knowledge of the sister's condition. They were told that the prosecution must establish against each of the defendants that his or her conduct amounted to a reckless disregard of the sister's health and welfare. The jury convicted of manslaughter and the defendants appealed.

29. Counsel for the appellants relying upon the decision in Lowe (1973) 57 Cr. App. R. 365 argued that there had been a misdirection in that the jury were not told that, before they could convict of manslaughter, they must be satisfied that the Crown had proved against each defendant that he or she must have appreciated that there was a risk of death or serious injury. In rejecting that argument, Geoffrey Lane, L.J. cited well known dicta by Lord Atkin in Andrews v. Director of Public Prosecutions (1937) 26 Cr. App. R. 34, and by Lord Hewart C.J. in Bateman (1925) 19 Cr. App. R. 8 as establishing the principle that the high degree of negligence required to be proved in establishing felony is best described by the epithet "reckless". He went on to say:

"The duty which a defendant has undertaken is a duty of caring for the health and welfare of the infirm person. What the prosecution have to prove is a breach of that duty in such circumstances that the jury feel convinced that the defendant's conduct can properly be described as reckless. That is to say a reckless disregard of danger to the health and welfare of the infirm person. Mere inadvertence is not enough. The defendant must be proved to have been indifferent to an obvious risk of injury to health, or actually to have foreseen the risk but to have determined nevertheless to run it."

30. Mr. van Buuren in seeking to turn aside the authority of Stone & Dobinson, relies upon a criticism of that passage which appears at p.230 in the Textbook of Criminal law by Professor Glanville Williams. The writer professes to discern a contradiction in the judgment of the Court of Appeal. Counsel for the Appellant in Stone & Dobinson had argued that there must bean appreciation by the defendant of the risk of death or serious injury before a conviction for manslaughter by omission or neglect could result. This argument was rejected by the court. The contradiction is said to inhere in the contrast between the "mere inadvertence”which is said not to be enough to support a charge of unlawfully causing death and "indifference to an obvious risk of injury to health". Taking this passage as constituting the ratio of the case, Professor Williams summarizes his criticism of the decision in these words:

"So the court apparently meant to espouse the doctrine of gross inadvertent negligence, and to say that inadvertence was enough though it said the opposite. If so, the court not only departed from Lowe but ignored the authorities that have been accumulating to the effect that recklessness in the criminal law bears a subjective meaning."

31. The case of Lowe (1973) Q.B. 702 is invoked because the Court of Appeal had there approved the standard of recklessness as the test of liability in manslaughter and because (at p.709) Phillimore L.J. allowing the appeal had posed the question: "How then can mere neglect, albeit wilful, amount to manslaughter?"

32. We cannot agree that there is any real self-contradiction in the judgment in Stone. The argument which the court was primarily concerned with - and was rejecting - was the argument that there should be an appreciation by the defendant of the risk of death or serious injury before liability could arise. It is clear however that the court thought that a reckless disregard of danger to the health and welfare of the infirm person would be enough.

33. In saying that mere inadvertence is not enough, it may be that what was in mind was a distinction between "mere" (or innocent) inadvertence to a risk which exists but is by no menas obvious; and “culpable” inadvertence which, applying the objective test of the reasonable person, would itself constitute gross negligence or reckless disregard in the face of what was, objectively considered, an obvious risk of injury to health.

34. Inadvertence and indifference to consequences are not the same thing. One can, that is to say, be advertent to the act one is doing while being indifferent to its possible consequences either a) because although the risk of such consequences is perceived it is nonetheless disregarded; or b) because no thought whatsoever is given to any possible consequences.

35. Both of these levels of guilty intent are reflected in this disputed passage from the judgment in Stone and it is clear that the final four lines thereof embrace both an objective and a subjective test for determining guilty intent. An act satisfying either of these would suffice for guilt.

36. Professor Glanville Williams suggests that an accumulation of recent authority in England tends to approve the notion of a subjective meaning for recklessness. It is clear however that very recent authority - binding upon this court - has decisively come down, in terms similar to those used in Stone & Dobinson, upon the side of objective considerations as constituting the test of criminal liability.

37. We have authoritative pronouncements from the House of Lords on this topic in Caldwell (1981) 1 All E.R. 964 and Lawrence (1981) 1 All E.R. 974 which Archbold in the latest edition accepts as laying down the law on` this point. The opinion of Lord Diplock was accepted by the majority in the first of these decisions and unanimously in the second and the effect of all the consenting speeches is conveniently summarized at p.1008 in Archbold, para. 17-25 in the following words:

"Recklessness on the part of the doer of an act presupposes that there is something in the circumstances that would have drawn the attention of an ordinary prudent individual to the possibility that his act was capable of causing the kind of serious harmful consequences that the section that created the offence was intended to prevent, and that the risk of those harmful consequences occurring was not so slight that an ordinary prudent individual would feel justified in treating them as negligible. It is only when this is so that the doer of the act is acting "recklessly" if, before doing the act, he either fails to give any thought to the possibility of there being such risk or, having recognised that there was such a risk, he nevertheless goes on to do it."

38. This embodies what has come to be regarded as the model statement of principle propounded by Diplock L.J. in Lawrence. A recent commentary (Criminal law Review 1983 at page 5) suggests that this proposition still leaves a safe exit for the person who has given thought to the possibility of there being a risk but who honestly, though unreasonably, has dismissed it as negligible. The writer is primarily concerned with the crime of rape and more especially with the decision of the House of Lords in the much debated case of Morgan (1976) A.C. 182 which was followed by a cross-fire in the public prints between its supporters and detractors, culminating in the enactment of s.l of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act of 1976, but the point obviously merits consideration in relation to all crimes of specific intention such as the courts were dealing with in Caldwell, Lawrence, and Morgan itself . It may be questioned whether the kind of moral, emotional and intellectual obtuseness which is advanced as an excuse for not appreciating the nature and extent of a risk, itself clear to all reasonable people, and which is consequently urged as a sufficient solvent of mens rea, had not better be placed under a different rubric of exculpation altogether. It might be said that an aberration so grossly at odds with the rational and moral sensibilities of ordinary prudent people should be classed rather with some milder variant of insanity such as diminished responsibility. Be that as it may, this doubt does not touch the present case, since - as seems to be generally conceded - manslaughter is not a crime of specific intent, and negligence affords in its regard a judicially recognised category of criminal liability.

39. Lord Diplock is clearly unhappy with what he regards as an obsessive concern on the part of lawyers with the distinction between the terms subjective and objective, but nevertheless the distinction remains and these decisions are firmly in favour of the objective test.

40. Although in Caldwell and in Lawrence the word "reckless" occurred in a statutory provision, it is clear that the opinions expressed in the speeches of all those who favoured this view, employ the term with its normal connotations as a term of familiar speech. In Newbury (1976) 62 Cr. App. Rep. 291 where the charge was manslaughter, Lord Salmon, reviewing earlier decisions of the Court of Criminal Appeal, said bluntly (p.296): "the test is still the objective test. In judging whether the act was dangerous the test is not did the accused recognise that it was dangerous but would all sober and reasonable people recognise its danger".

41. Although these cases do not seem to have been put before it, a differently constituted division of the present court has come to the same conclusion. In Lee Wang Fat and Another v. The Queen 1982, H.K.L.R. 133, the defendants were charged upon one count with the wilful neglect of a child contrary to the provisions of s.27 of the Offences Against the Person Ordinance, and in the second charge with the manslaughter of the same child. Counsel for the Appellants urged the decision in Sheppard (1980) 3 All E.R. 899 in favour of applying a subjective test in relation to the former charge. Li, J.A., giving the judgment of the court, accepted the argument in relation to the wilful neglect charge and went on to say (p.136):

"The count of manslaughter, however, at common law, as it now stands, requires gross negligence and recklessness depending on the standard of a reasonable man."

42. The point is not of purely academic interest since there may be cases where, as in the present case, a defendant seeks to withdraw a plea of guilty and in which it could well be said that upon the facts agreed there was nothing which went so far as an admission that the defendant was possessed of the necessary degree of foresight or knowledge. It would then be difficult to deny him the opportunity of having the jury consider that defence. Whereas, on the objective view, a court of appeal would obviously be on firm ground in refusing such an opportunity since it could reasonably claim to be as well equipped as any jury to decide the question whether a reasonable man must have envisaged or might not have envisaged, the consequences of the conduct complained of.

43. On the view taken by the court in Stone & Dobinson which we endorse and adopt, such considerations do, however, become as Mr. Mason-Parker has argued, distinctly academic in the present case. Even if the facts produced upon trial were to go no further in favour of the applicant than they go upon what is before this court, it is inconceivable that any jury could take the view that the father of this child might not have realized that the conduct of his wife, which he was condoning, would not at the very least interfere with the child's health and welfare.

44. This case, like Stone & Dobinson, but unlike Russell (1933) V.L.R. 59 and other similar cases, is a "course of conduct" case. We are not here concerned with one dramatic and fatal incident coupled with one incident of standing-by under circumstances represented to the court as being culpably negligent to the high degree required for manslaughter. We are, that is to say, in the territory of cases such as Nicholls (1874) 13 Cox 75, Marriott (1838) 8 C & P 425, Instan (1893) 1 Q.B. 450 (CCR) and Bonnynan (1942) 228 Cr. App. R. 131.

45. On the facts here it is likely that there was a particular beating which inflicted the injuries resulting in death and it is not agreed that the applicant was present when that particular beating was inflicted. We are mindful of the distinction drawn by the court in Lowe between an act of omission and an act of commission likely to cause harm. But that case in common with many others approved the standard denoted by the term "reckless" as the best available term to express the high degree of negligence required. Although a lingering doubt appears to remain, at any rate in academic circles, as to whether "gross negligence" is strictly equivalent to "recklessness", we can see no great advantage in making such a distinction, provided it is understood that both terms cover at the least a very high degree of negligence.

46. There is however much to be said for the view, most recently and authoritatively expressed by the Lord Chief Justice in Cato (1976) 62 Cr. App. Rep. 41 at p.48, and again by Lord Halisham, L.C. in Lawrence (1981) 1 All E.R. 974, at p.978 to the general effect that "reckless" is not a lawyer's word but is a simple and well-understood word of ancient lineage which has been in popular usage for a very long time and that it can thus be safely left to a jury to decide whether the act or omission complained of conforms with their idea of what is reckless.

47. We have no doubt that a father who, over a long-period of time, has first-hand experience of the fact that his wife habitually and violently assaults their child of tender years using both hands and feet in doing so, is showing a reckless disregard for that child's health and welfare by neglecting to take any reasonable step to protect her. He has, by condoning it, joined in a course of conduct which not only did not ensure the child's welfare, but put it at positive risk of severe damage. He could not, upon trial, conceivably have escaped responsibility by pleading that he did not appreciate that her health and welfare were greatly at risk. For these reasons the application must be refused.

Silke, J.A.:

48. I have had the opportunity of reading in draft the judgment of Vice-President McMullin and have only this to add.

49. We do not know the exact moment at which the blow, from a kick - which is the more likely - or a fist, landed on the girl but the evidence is abundantly clear that, on the morning of the 6th February, the child had been severely beaten and to the knowledge of the applicant. This beating was but another in the very terrible course of conduct adopted by the mother towards this infant. The applicant admitted himself to fear the bringing of the girl to school that day because of the outward manifestations of that beating. Having seen the photographs of the body of the child, which evidence was before the trial judge, that fear is understandable.

50. Here it matters not that the applicant may not have been present when the fatal blow landed once that blow was part of a known course of conduct which conduct over a period and towards a young child was of such continuing severity that there was a high risk of grievous bodily harm, not to speak of danger to her welfare, being caused. By his indifference to or recklessness of the consequences of that which he knew to be happening, whether resulting from weakness of character or stupidity, the applicant who had a duty of care condoned the risk and his conduct attracted to himself the high degree of negligence sufficient to found the crime of manslaughter. The trial judge was correct in his acceptance of the guilty plea.

51. This was a case where all the early warning signs were present. I do not wish anything I say now to be considered as a criticism of the actions of the outside authorities who were aware of and took action on the incidents to this child. It is very easy to be wise after the event.

52. I would, however, urgently suggest that some form of timely and effective consultation involving all of those concerned - be they medical authorities or governmental departments - be arranged whereby decisions can be come to which will allow positive action to be taken to avoid a repetition. The Protection of Women and Juveniles Ordinance provides machinery which can be used in situations such as this.

53. Having said that I am in respectful agreement with the conclusion of My Lord and the reasoning therefore, I too would refuse the application.

Representation:

Brian van Buuren, Esq. instructed by Messrs. Wong, Hui & Souza for applicant.

S.R. Mason-Parker, Esq. for Crown/Respondent.