Hong Kong Case Law: Decisions & Judgments | LexChat

Hong Kong Case Law

Unexplained affluence
  • 11 Apr 1983

    THE QUEEN v. LAM HON KEUNG

    Citation
    THE QUEEN v. LAM HON KEUNG
    Court
    Court of Appeal
    Case number
    CACC128/1983

    The magistrate misdirected himself by over-emphasising two tenuous strands—an assertion that planting would be implausible in public given civilians present and a judicially noted unexplained cash amount—where unexplained affluence alone, without corroborating circumstantial strands, cannot sustain the necessary inference of trafficking; that misdirection could have led to a different assessment of the police evidence and therefore rendered the conviction unsafe, warranting quashing of conviction and sentence and restoration of the suspended sentence.