- COMMDEN ME
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Recommendations
23.
It is interesting to note the attitude adopted by the Court of Appeal in LAM Chi-wai v. R.; 1979 H.K.L.R. 48. This was an appeal against a sentence of 4 years imprisonment and 12 strokes of the cane for a charge of robbery. The Appellant, along with others, had entered a private residence, threatened the female occupant and then tied, blindfolded and gagged her. While one of them ransacked the flat, the other held a knife to the woman's neck. The judgement of the Court of Appeal contained the following observation :-
"We are far from saying that a sentence of corporal punishment should never be imposed in addition to a substantial term of
imprisonment, but we do say that it should not be so imposed unless there are circumstances of special aggravation, for example violence indicating a high degree of callousness or where long terms of imprisonment on a particular defendant have proved ineffective: its imposition should be the exception and not the rule. Such was not the position here: there was no factor of special aggravation which made it appropriate to impose a caning in addition to a term of imprisonment.
We set aside the sentence imposed by the learned judge on the first charge and
- substitute a sentence of four and a half
years' imprisonment. This is more lenient than we might have been if we had been -imposing the sentence in the first instance.
CONFIDENTIAL
/P.11
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