Sentences of 4 ex-student leaders who praised stabbing of Hong Kong police officer reduced to 15 months
Hong Kong Free Press
A Hong Kong appeals court has reduced the “obviously excessive” sentences given to four former student leaders who praised a knife-attack on police in July 2021, trimming their jail terms to 15 months.
Kinson Cheung, Charles Kwok, Chris Todorovski and Anthony Yung, who were members of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) Students’ Union Council, were jailed for two years for “incitement to wound with intent” last October.
Their case revolved around a motion passed by the HKU student body to mourn the death of Leung Kin-fai, who killed himself after stabbing and wounding a police officer on July 1, 2021 – the 24th anniversary of Hong Kong’s Handover from Britain to China.
Three Court of Appeal judges last Friday ruled the two-year jail terms handed down by District Judge Adriana Noelle Tse Ching were excessive and reduced the sentences, according to local media reports.
The appeal was heard by judges Jeremy Poon, Derek Pang, and Anthea Pang, who will hand down their reasons in three months.
During the trial, the court heard that the four HKU students had praised Leung’s “sacrifice” and called him a “martyr,” while authorities had condemned the incident as a “lone-wolf local terrorist act.”
They were originally charged for “advocating terrorism” under the Beijing-imposed national security law in 2020, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment. But they eventually reached an agreement with the prosecution and pleaded guilty to incitement to wounding, a lesser charge.
Judge Tse set 35-month jail term as a starting point before making discounts due to their guilty pleas and youth, eventually fixing a two-year sentence for each of the four. They later launched an appeal against the sentence.
During the appeal hearing last Friday, lawyers for the four cited other cases of inciting violence to contend that the sentencing for their clients was too heavy.
Steven Kwan, representing Todorovski and Yung, said judge Tse had wrongly considered the present case to be more serious than a case in which the defendant had called for an encirclement of a detention facility.
That defendant was given an order of 160 hours of community service after trial and was later jailed for 13 months on appeal by the Department of Justice.
Senior Counsel Robert Pang, for Cheung, said Tse had mistakenly set an overly high starting point for sentencing compared with another case she handled, in which she sentenced a woman to 10 months in jail for calling on others to imitate the knife attack.
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