That act cost her her life, and her son the potential of his relationship with his mother.
The accused was charged with a single count of murder.
Prior to the trial, I am told that an offer was made to the prosecution to plead guilty to manslaughter. That offer was rejected, but when the accused was arraigned he entered a plea to that effect. It was indicated to me on his behalf that the basis of the plea was provocation or unlawful act manslaughter.
It would be fair to say that the trial or the defence was run on the basis primarily of provocation, and that is understandable.
It must be by the verdict that the jury returned of manslaughter by an unlawful act that they found that the prosecution had failed to prove that the accused intended to kill or to cause grievous bodily harm to his wife, that is because to return a verdict of manslaughter by unlawful act it was necessary for them to find that he intended something less than that, in other words, that something less than that was intended.
Without seeking to go behind or establish the thinking in the jury’s decision, it must simply be as a matter of common sense that they took into account, as they were instructed to do, all the circumstances surrounding her death. And in order to have arrived at their decision, it seems to me self-evident that they must have, to a greater or lesser extent, accepted the explanation given by the accused in his interviews.
The thrust of that explanation was that he had been told by the deceased that day, in a repetition of a demand that she had made several days earlier, that she wished to secure a divorce. It was, he told the police, this factor and her adamant stance, despite his pleas for her to reconsider, that caused him to act as he did.
Let the accused be clear about this, that there are never any circumstances in which a demand for a divorce by one party justifies the killing of a spouse.
Whilst it may have been that demand that caused the accused to behave as he did, there was testimony - much of it unchallenged - throughout the trial which revealed that there had been a longstanding relationship between the accused and the deceased. The nature of that relationship has, according to the evidence which the jury heard, varied over the years.
The evidence of the deceased’s sister was that when she and the deceased were still at school, and the deceased was approximately 11 years old, they came to know the accused.
The deceased’s mother testified that the accused had regularly and persistently sought the company of the deceased.
The deceased’s sister testified that the accused and the deceased continued to meet after they had finished school. She and the deceased in 1988 were working together when the deceased met a Hong Kong man. The deceased and that man formed a relationship, and in early 2004 they married in Hong Kong.
In 2007, and whilst still married to that man, the deceased met a taxi driver. He was mainland-based. They developed a sexual relationship within a matter of months, and in 2009 she bore him a child. The child remained in the mainland with the deceased’s lover, whilst the deceased lived in Hong Kong - at least for a part of the time with her Hong Kong husband.
The deceased regularly visited her son in the mainland, and appears to have continued her relationship with the father of the child. Although he said that there had been some unspecified problems that developed between them and it lost its sexual nature for a period.
The deceased’s sister testified that the deceased had then started to live with the accused in the mainland “not long”, to use her phrase, after her marriage to the Hong Kong male. It seems, therefore, that she was running three relationships simultaneously at that stage. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to hear the father of her child say that as far as he was aware the accused knew of his relationship with the deceased.
In late 2011, the deceased divorced her Hong Kong husband. Very soon after that, and in any event before Christmas 2011, the accused and the deceased married in Hong Kong.
The relationship between the deceased and the father of her child continued. After the deceased had married the accused, at the end 2011 she moved back to the mainland. But later, and at the beginning of 2011, she moved back to Hong Kong with the accused.
The father of the deceased’s son testified that he would, from time to time, bring the child to Hong Kong to see the deceased, and he testified that he knew of the presence of the accused in the deceased’s life, and he himself described the accused as being the first love of the deceased.
He said that he had been approached by the accused who had telephoned him and asking him to come out to meet with him because he wanted to talk over the situation that then prevailed.
It is not clear to me, anyway, at what stage he actually became aware of a relationship between the deceased and the accused.
He suggested that he had suspected that the deceased loved somebody else, and this explained why she spent a lot of time in Hong Kong, but it is not clear as to when he actually knew of the involvement of the accused with the deceased.
It was his testimony that although there had been a period during his relationship with the deceased during which they had not had sexual intercourse, they had resumed having intercourse prior to the day of her death.
It was his testimony, indeed, that he had had intercourse with her on the day before her death, 2 August, before taking her to the railway station to return to her husband, the accused, in Hong Kong.
He had received certain text messages from the accused, which he initially described, as he felt, were threatening towards him. He accepted, it seemed to me in evidence, that it was possible that they were messages that were simply telling him to stay away from the deceased who was loved by another person.
The accused, in his interviews by the police, confirmed that he was aware of the on-going relationship between the deceased and the father of her child, and that he had asked her to moderate that relationship, as well as her gambling about which he had spoken to her on previous occasions.
It was not clear from the evidence at just what stage the childhood romance between the deceased and the accused blossomed into a physical relationship between them in later years. It is clear, however, that the accused was enamoured of the deceased from an early age, and refers to the attraction she exercised towards him over a long period, which ultimately ended in their marriage.
He described the relationship between himself and the deceased as “a stormy one”, and he said they argued, or fought, frequently.
It was certainly clear from the evidence that their relationship, and presumably their marriage, was one which was disapproved of by her family. Neither her elder sister nor her mother made any pretence in the evidence that the family approved of this marriage.
This is all material which may assist in understanding just why the accused behaved as he did and killed the very person with whom he had expressed himself to be in love for a considerable period of time.
The accused had exhibited violence to the deceased beforehand. He related an incident in the mainland in March 2012 where had grabbed her by the throat. He also accepted that there had been a physical confrontation between them on one occasion in Hong Kong. There may have been more, depending on the view one takes of other testimony that has been heard.
When the deceased and the accused on 3 August started to talk to one another and the issue of divorce came up, it is clear that the situation rapidly deteriorated. The accused says that both of them were volatile that day, and that the deceased remained adamant that she wished to divorce him.
During the course of that encounter, he reached the stage where he put his arm around the throat of the deceased and, thereafter, held her by the neck with his hands. He blocked her nose to presumably prevent her from breathing for a period which he described as until his hand went numb. He gave a graphic demonstration of this during his interview, and although, of course, we only have his version of what actually happened that day, it does seem to be consistent with the medical evidence.
The doctor who examined him that day said that he had minor scratch marks which were consistent with having been caused when the deceased was struggling whilst the accused was strangling her. It could have been caused by someone struggling whilst being strangled from behind, he said.
The forensic pathologist who carried out the post-mortem examination on the deceased concluded that the findings that he made could have been caused by manual strangulation, and were consistent with the description given by the accused to the police which he had watched.
He testified that it was generally agreed that it was necessary for there to be unremitting pressure on the neck for a minimum of 15 to 30 seconds for the type of injuries which he observed to have occurred.
For there to be irreversible brain damage, which he indicated may have been one of the causes of death, it would have been necessary for the onset of hypoxia for the strangulation to have lasted some four to five minutes.
The accused himself said in the interviews that his mind was a blank at the time so he could not recall the time period for which he had held the neck of the deceased, but he described it as a very long time.
Clearly, the injuries inflicted on the deceased were no‑chance injuries, nor were they, in any sense, minor.
When the accused realised that he had apparently killed his wife, he telephoned the police. He told them that he had mistakenly killed his wife, and when he was asked he said that he had strangled her. He remained at the scene and awaited the arrival of the police.
He said several times in the interview that he had telephoned the police because he wanted them to arrive quickly to see if his wife could be resuscitated. Although, it has to be said that in the call to the police there was no such indication.
There was evidence that when he was arrested and cautioned for the murder of his wife, he relied that, “Because my wife told me that she wanted to divorce me, I strangled her to death by accident”.
There was evidence from a police officer of considerable distress on the part of the accused when the deceased’s body was being removed from their flat. He was cooperative with the police throughout that day, and spoke at length in two video-recorded interviews.
It is correct that at the end of the second interview he appeared to become emotional once more and unable to continue. He maintained throughout those interviews, as he effectively had done from the time he first notified the police of the death of the deceased, that the death of his wife was unintentional.
He did not attempt to flee. That is a comparatively common experience that people do tend to flee after having committed an offence of this nature, but the accused was the one who alerted the authorities, waited for them, and has not shied from the fact that he caused the death of the deceased.
He certainly has expressed contrition for his behaviour throughout. That is a fact which I shall take into account in determining sentence, as are the background issues which I have outlined, as well as his plea to manslaughter.
Sentencing in manslaughter cases has been described by the Court of Appeal as an art form, and it has indicated that the circumstances in each case of manslaughter are so individual that reference to sentences passed in other cases really can only provide the broadest of indicators of the type or range of sentences imposed.
It is, of course, a real feature of this case that this was a manslaughter that occurred in a domestic environment. There is a lamentable tendency for people to resort to violence in that type of situation.
I started the sentencing remarks by saying that in no circumstances is violence justifiable, and it must be very firmly borne in mind that the result of this was that a woman who wished to divorce, for whatever reasons, is now dead.
Manslaughter offences are the one example where the court is not required to determine an appropriate starting point and then make arithmetical deductions from it. I have taken into account all the factors that I have mentioned in the course of these remarks.
In my judgment, the justice of this case will be served by the accused serving a period of eight years’ imprisonment. That is the sentence you are to serve.