R. v. TANG WING KEUNG

CACC000707/1996

IN THE COURT OF APPEAL

1996, No. 707

(Criminal)

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BETWEEN
	THE QUEEN
	and
	TANG WING KEUNG

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Coram: Nazareth Ag CJ, Bokhary JA & Stuart-Moore J in Court

Date of hearing: 5, June 1997

Date of judgment: 5, June 1997

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J U D G M E N T

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Bokhary JA:

1. This is an application for leave to appeal against conviction. It comes to us from a trial in the District Court before Deputy Judge W K Kwok.

2. The applicant is a man in his late 20's. Together with another man, he faced one charge. It was of the robbery, in Lau Fau Shan on July 4 last year, of a taxi driver in whose taxi they were passengers.

3. On November 15 last year, the judge convicted this applicant and his co-accused. We are only concerned with this applicant.

4. The judge convicted him on three pieces of evidence. The first was the identification of the applicant by the taxi driver, which identification the judge felt sure was reliable. The second was the applicant's signed confession to the police, which confession the judge felt sure was voluntary and true. And the third was the recovery of a knife, which the judge felt sure the applicant had led the police to find and told them had been used in the robbery.

5. In support of his application for leave to appeal against conviction, the applicant has written a number of points to which he chose to add nothing in the course of his opportunity to present oral arguments.

6. Those points are there, set out at some length, for us to read. And we have considered them with care. The points go to: (i) the applicant's identification by the taxi driver; (ii) the police evidence about the applicant's confession and the recovery of the knife; and (iii) a complaint by the applicant that counsel for the prosecution at the trial, who does not appear before us to-day, had asserted to the judge that the taxi driver's description of his, the applicant's jeans as "somewhat blackish in colour" covered the blue jeans which he, the applicant, had been wearing.

7. It is clear from the judge's Reasons for Verdict, which we have studied with care, that he considered in depth all the evidence and arguments for and against the identification, the confession and the recovery of the knife.

8. As for the colour of the jeans, the question is whether there is any real danger that any assertion of that kind by counsel for the prosecution, assuming such an assertion to have been made and made in precisely the way that the applicant alleges, would have distracted the judge from forming his own wholly independent view on the matter. Having studied the judge's reasons with care, we have come firmly to the conclusion that there is no such danger here.

9. In the result, therefore, leave to appeal against conviction is refused.

(G P Nazareth)	(K Bokhary)	(M Stuart-Moore)
Acting Chief	Justice of Appeal	Judge of the High
Justice		Court

Representation:

Applicant, Tang Wing-keung in person

Mr D G Saw QC & Mr Naresh Daryanani (of the Attorney General's Chambers) for the respondent