Hong Kong court orders retrial for former university professor convicted of murdering wife
Hong Kong Free Press
A Hong Kong court has ordered a retrial for former University of Hong Kong professor Cheung Kie-chung after he successfully appealed against his murder conviction over killing his wife in 2018.
The Court of Appeal on Friday quashed Cheung’s murder verdict and ordered a fresh trial for the former engineering scholar, local media reported. A panel of three judges allowed Cheung’s appeal after hearing the defence argument that the trial judge had misdirected the jury by failing to give sufficient weight to the professor’s mental state at the time of the killing.
During his original trial in 2020, Cheung sought to plead guilty to manslaughter, but that plea was rejected by the prosecution. The court heard at the time that Cheung had strangled his wife Tina Chan using a cable at their university residence on August 17, 2018, before concealing her body inside a wooden box in his office.
The defence team attempted to establish that Cheung had killed Chan while under the influence of depression and anger, meaning that he should be charged with the lesser offence of manslaughter by reason of provocation or diminished responsibility.
But a jury eventually found him guilty in November 2020 of murder in a five-to-two majority verdict, and Cheung was sentenced to life behind bars the following month. He also pleaded guilty to one count of preventing a lawful burial.
The defence on Friday said that High Court judge Anthea Pang, who oversaw the original trial, did not properly instruct the jury to consider the testimony made by Sammy Cheng, a clinical psychologist and an expert witness. The witness testified then that a person could forget about the details of an event under “extreme pressure.”
Senior Counsel Lee Shu-wan, in place of lead defence lawyer Senior Counsel Graham Harris who was sick, told the court that Cheng’s testimony was important in considering Cheung’s mental state at the time of the killing and should not be excluded.
Appeal justices Andrew Macrae, Kevin Zervos, and Maggie Poon allowed Cheung’s appeal and ordered a retrial by a different judge. A written judgment would be handed down in two months, the judges said.
Cheung was remanded in custody pending retrial, for which a date is yet to be set.
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