Tales from No.9 Ice House Street

8. The Case of the Ruptured Kidney

Preamble The following is a murder trial and another of the eight court cases described in my first book, A Seventh Child and the Law. Since its publication, I have received not a few letters from interested readers enquiring politely but with great concern whether to my knowledge as defence counsel for the first accused, my lay client, and/or the second and third accused in the case, had in fact been responsible for causing the death of the deceased. If not, whether the police officers and men at Wong Tai Sin Police Station should instead have been charged. It is in response to those enquiries that I have taken the liberty of causing this account to be reprinted with a number of paragraphs added at the end, hopefully to satisfy the curiosity of those interested readers who have taken the trouble to write to me about the case. This was one of the more difficult cases handled by me in the thirtyodd years of my practice at the Bar. The ultimate result of the appeal pronounced by the Full Court against all the odds at the time was not only gratifying professionally, but also a great personal welcome relief to me as counsel representing the first accused. The Case of the Ruptured Kidney 8 8 1967 was a truly traumatic year for Hong Kong, then still a British colony. In the month of April, the Cultural Revolution in China, which had  108 TALES FROM NO. 9 ICE HOUSE STREET swept like wild fire through most parts of the mainland, reared its ugly head in this mainly Chinese populated colonial outpost of the British Commonwealth. Overnight, thousands of political agitators took to the streets. Wearing head and armbands, shaking their arms and fists, shouting anti-British slogans, and carrying pro-Communist banners, they marched daily in thunderous but well-organized formation through the heart of town, taunting the authorities, and blatantly brushing law and order aside. At one stage, those agitators even tried in vain to storm Government House situate at Upper Albert Road, only just failing to break through the police lines, but leaving not a few battered policemen behind. On both sides of the harbour, countless packages of varying description and sizes containing bombs — some real and some otherwise — were found each day in the streets as well as in other public places. Despite repeated warnings from the authorities to stay away from them, quite a number of people including children were injured when curiosity led them to examine some of those packages. The few explosive-disposal specialists available in Hong Kong were kept fully occupied racing against time to detonate these lethal packages before more people were hurt, and in the course of carrying out his duty one of them tragically lost an arm. This bomb scare was a real nightmare which, together with the intimidating marches of the militant demonstrators, had the people of Hong Kong living daily in awesome fear and misgivings. For a while a curfew was imposed every evening by the government, rendering it an offence for anyone without special permission to be found in the streets after dark. This state of affairs lasted some eight weeks, during which the police were specifically instructed to exercise utmost self-restraint in dealing with demonstrators, and to avoid, if at all possible, any head-on confrontation with them. Those instructions were, by and large, admirably carried out. On numerous occasions, though, the police were compelled to intervene when harmless bystanders and other law-abiding citizens were harassed, intimidated, or molested by those demonstrators. Yet in the ensuing fracas, because of their standing instructions, the lawmen had to back down every time from making any arrests, despite breaches of the peace having obviously been committed, despite dire abuse being regularly hurled at them, and despite physical injury having frequently been sustained by them. In one particular instance, a police station was literally besieged by a splinter group of demonstrators for almost two hours. Windows were broken as a result of stones and other objects being thrown, and officers THE CASE OF THE RUPTURED KIDNEY 109 and men of that station were jostled and insulted as they departed from or returned to the station. The situation at times looked so ugly that not a few of the local newspapers ventured to ask whether our much vaunted police force was still capable of maintaining law and...