香港特別行政區 訴 馬海權

On 14 August 2026, the Court of Appeal handed down judgment in HKSAR v Ma Hoi Kuen (CACC 184/2024), allowing the applicant's appeal against conviction for dangerous driving causing death and substituting a conviction for careless driving. Mr Lai Ming, instructed by Vincent T.K. Cheung, Yap & Co., acted for the successful applicant; the respondent was represented by Ms Wong Lok-tung, Senior Public Prosecutor.

The applicant drove a light goods vehicle along the southbound carriageway of Fo Tan Road, a single-direction four-lane road with a 50 km/h limit. After overtaking a stationary bus by cutting into the second lane and back, he approached a signal-controlled pedestrian crossing. The southbound signal turned green as he neared the stop line. A woman, who had stepped off the central refuge earlier and was still crossing eastbound, ran across the first lane and was struck.

The applicant pleaded not guilty to dangerous driving causing death and was convicted after trial before Deputy Judge Cheng Kei-hong in DCCC 621/2023, who sentenced him to 16 months' imprisonment, five years' disqualification, and an improvement course. Bail was granted and a single judge certified the application for leave to appeal direct to the Court of Appeal. Poon Wai-cheong VP, with Yeung Ka-hung JA and Chan Hing-wai J, heard the appeal on 21 July 2026 and allowed it.

The central evidence was dashcam footage from two vehicles behind the applicant. The Court of Appeal, drawing on its own viewing of the footage, accepted the prosecution's description that the Honda in lane two had moved off at a normal起步 speed when the signal changed, with its brake lights already extinguished and only dim tail lights showing. The deputy judge had described the Honda's movement as "very slow" and "requiring careful observation to detect", which the appellate court found incomplete: the Honda was plainly in the act of pulling away, signalling as much to any following driver.

The Court held that:

the deputy judge erred by isolating the applicant's subjective misperception (that the Honda had not moved) and treating it, in a vacuum, as the basis for a dangerous driving finding. The proper inquiry is objective and holistic: would the driving amount to dangerous driving if the applicant had exercised a proper degree of attention and observed the actual road conditions? If not, the driving cannot be elevated to dangerous merely because the driver in fact paid insufficient attention. Here, a driver who saw the Honda pulling away at normal起步 speed with only tail lights showing, and who maintained 50 km/h through the crossing, would not be driving dangerously. The same answer follows where the driver failed to notice those facts because he relied on the green signal alone. The case is one of careless, not dangerous, driving. The three authorities cited below (HKSAR v Wong Cheong-kit, HKSAR v Yu Wing-shing, HKSAR v Cheung Kwok-leung) all involved crossings with clear visibility on both sides, materially different from a situation where the only risk arose from a vehicle that was itself moving off normally.

Result:

the dangerous driving conviction and sentence were quashed. The applicant was convicted of careless driving and sentenced to a term he had already served (just under five months). Given that the original five-year disqualification had effectively barred him from driving for some one year and seven months pending appeal, no fresh disqualification was imposed, but he was ordered to complete a driving improvement course at his own expense within three months.

What it means for practitioners:

when prosecuting or defending a dangerous driving case where the driver misperceived or failed to register an obvious road condition, the court must first ask whether the driving would have been dangerous had the driver been paying proper attention. If the answer is no, inattentiveness alone does not convert the conduct into dangerous driving; it may still be careless. Dashcam evidence will routinely be re-read on appeal: appellate courts will reconstruct the scene themselves and are willing to depart from a trial judge's characterisation of vehicle movements where the footage shows something more or different.