CRIMINAL CASE NO. 14 OF 2011
COURT: Kwok Ngai-man, you have pleaded guilty to robbing Mr Ng Kam-fuk of $510,000 in cash and a cheque in the sum of $325,000 in the centre of Sai Kung town on 16 October 2006. Mr Ng, the victim of this offence, was one of the proprietors of a family business, the Chuen Kee Seafood Restaurant, Sai Kung. It was his custom to take the restaurant’s takings to the local branch of the Bank of China in Yi Chun Street on Monday mornings.
At about 10 am on the day of the robbery, Monday, 16 October 2006, he put $510,000 in $1,000 banknotes together with a cheque for $325,000 into a cloth bag and started to walk to the bank from the restaurant, along Man Nin Street, holding the cloth bag. While he was walking along the pavement, you, wearing a surgical mask to hide your identity, came up behind him and grabbed his hand which was holding the bag with the money. Having grabbed the hand, you chopped the hand with a beef knife.
Despite his injury, Mr Ng turned round and put up courageous resistance. He grabbed you by the arms. A struggle ensued between you for the knife, during which he and you fell to the ground, causing you to release the knife. He then held your body, calling out “Robbery” and “Help” while you still struggled to free yourself.
At this point, your accomplice, who was sitting in a parked car on the other side of the street, took out a second beef knife from the back seat of the car and ran towards you and Mr Ng. He then started to chop Mr Ng to his head and body until Mr Ng released the bag holding the money. During his attack on Mr Ng, Mr Ng managed at one point to manoeuvre your body so that your accomplice accidentally chopped you. You and your accomplice then fled with the bag holding the money to the parked car and drove off.
Mr Ng, who had sustained multiple chop wounds, was left by you lying severely injured on the pavement. Just over an hour later, the car was discovered by the police, abandoned at the Pak Kong Water Treatment Works. The number plates which had been on the car at the time of the robbery were found inside the car. The car had been stolen on the night of 9 August, a week previously. At the time of the robbery, it bore false number plates.
Bloodstains on the rear passenger seat eventually led, through DNA analysis, to the offence being connected to you. You were arrested almost four years later, on 10 August 2010.
Mr Ng was taken to Tseung Kwan O Hospital, suffering multiple chop wounds to his arms and face. A laceration wound to his face was 16 centimetres long, going down from the forehead above his right eyebrow to his upper neck near the angle of his jaw. The wound was deep down to the muscle layer, fracturing the bone next to the right orbital rim and zygomatic arch in his cheek with active bleeding spurters. His right eyeball was ruptured and his right facial nerve severed.
Amongst Mr Ng’s other injuries were a 7 centimetre long cut injury over his right forearm, a 15 centimetre long cut injury over his left forearm, a 3 centimetre long cut injury over his left thigh, a 1 centimetre long cut injury over his left wrist, a 4 centimetre long cut injury over his right wrist, abrasions over his right lateral chest, on the back of his right thigh, a 4 centimetre diameter round cut over the left side of his head and a fractured left first metacarpal bone.
After primary wound repairs were performed in a surgical operation at Tseung Kwan O Hospital, he was transferred to Hong Kong Sanatorium for further treatment on 20 October, for further surgery. He was discharged on 1 November 2006 and was followed up in the eye clinic at the Hong Kong Sanatorium. Despite multiple surgery to repair his eye and the retinal detachment, his right eye is legally blind as a result of his injury. He is left with permanent scars to his right face and upper limb. His facial nerve injury has only partially recovered.
This court has been provided with a victim impact statement made by Mr Ng a few days ago. It is clear that this robbery committed by you has had a profound effect on his life. It has affected not merely his eyesight but the use of at least one of his hands and his ability to carry heavy objects. He still suffers pain and has been affected psychologically, not simply by fear of being attacked again but by the effect of his scarring. Not surprisingly, he says that he will be unable to forget this incident for the rest of his life.
Robbery involving the use of knives is always a serious offence. Few of such robberies are as serious as this one. As I have said, the consequences of your actions or those of your accomplice will affect Mr Ng for the rest of his life.
Apart from the use of the knives and the injuries inflicted on Mr Ng, there are a number of other seriously aggravating features in this case. This was clearly a carefully pre-planned offence to take advantage of Mr Ng’s practice in taking the takings of the restaurant to the bank. It involved the use of a surgical mask by you to conceal your identity; it involved the use of a getaway car bearing false number plates to escape from the scene of the crime.
Mr Mitchell has said on your behalf that you were not the planner or organiser of the offence. However, you were clearly deeply implicated in it and it was obviously anticipated that you would play the principal role.
This was a robbery designed to take advantage of the fact that Mr Ng was likely to have, and indeed did have, a substantial sum of money on him. None of that money has been recovered. You were not acting alone but with an armed accomplice. The robbery was designed to take advantage of Mr Ng when he was at his most vulnerable, carrying money from his restaurant to the bank in a relatively peaceful part of Hong Kong.
Those who run businesses are entitled to assume that they can take their takings to the bank without fear of attack.
Much has been said by your counsel, Mr Mitchell, about the fact that the really serious wounds to Mr Ng were caused not by you but by your accomplice. That is a factor I take into account.
However, as far as you were concerned, the robbery you set out to commit was a robbery that not simply might cause physical injury to your victim but one that you knew would cause such injury. You had chopped Mr Ng’s hand holding the bag from behind, even before he had turned around. Your objective was to physically injure Mr Ng so that he would release the bag with the money. In such circumstances, it is very limited mitigation that your accomplice had to join in in order to accomplish the objective and the enterprise upon which you had embarked and, in doing so, inflicted the most serious of the wounds on your victim.
In deciding upon the appropriate starting point for this very serious robbery, I have borne in mind the cases referred to me by Mr Mitchell. However, I have also borne in mind the observations of the Court of Appeal in the case of The Crown v Chan Kwai To, CA228/1990, another robbery case involving serious injury, on the sentences passed on the 1st defendant in that case who had pleaded guilty.
While I have borne in mind that I am concerned to sentence you for this offence, I cannot ignore the fact that you are a man who, in the past, has not hesitated to show violence to achieve your criminal ends. Mr Mitchell has informed me that in the course of the robbery for which you were sentenced to 9 years’ imprisonment in 1996, while you were not armed during the course of that robbery, you struck a mother, rendering her unconscious, before tying up her son and daughter. You are clearly a dangerous criminal who shows no concern for your victims.
In all the circumstances, I am satisfied that the appropriate starting point in this case is one of 18 years’ imprisonment. The only real mitigation in this case is your plea of guilty which has saved Mr Ng the trauma of having to face you in court.
I sentence you to 12 years’ imprisonment.