tim's experiment

Well well. Here we have the former Head of Surgery at Hong Kong U convicted of a variety of charges, involving altogether $3million, and you might think that the clink of the gaoler’s key was an inevitable consequence, or failing that – the poor old gent is 71 after all – at least a stiff fine. Not a bit of it. Prisoner at the bar, you will be taken from here to a place of public need, there to perform 240 hours of community service. As the convict, Dr John Wong, has passed the retirement age (and I assume Hong Kong U is unlikely to invite him back, under the circumstances) he presumably has ample free time. So this could be considered scarcely a punishment at all. I am indebted to Alex Lo’s excellent piece in Saturday’s paper for the statistic that this comes to $12,500 per hour. Mr Lo also provided details of some cases which made an interesting contrast with Mr Wong’s, in which sundsry humble souls had been less lucky in their judges.

What puzzles me is that parts of the judge’s lengthy explanation for her sentence, or lack of it, seemed to contradict each other. Dr Wong, she said, “could have opted for a lucrative private practice, but he chose to achieve his ideal and spent his whole life working for the less fortunate and to serve the public.” This is very moving, but left me thinking that judges often over-estimate their knowledge of the world. To a young doctor the choice between private practice and a career as a teacher offers pluses and minuses on both sides. There is no guarantee that private practice will be lucrative. You may finish up making a respectable living on a public housing estate serving the public. On the other hand the university offers what is effectively an iron rice bowl, generous perks, long holidays and the chance to pursue your own interests. Generally speaking university teachers who are guilty of theft are not accorded gentle sentences because of their selfless career choices, and I am not sure doctors should be singled out in this regard.

Later on in the judgment we came to the point where Dr Wong had diverted $700,000 from two HKU accounts (a process known to the legally uneducated as theft) to pay for a driver for himself. The judge said this was not done out of greed, but because Dr Wong strongly believed that “the university should have contributed to the cost of his commuting.” I take this to mean that Dr Wong did not qualify for a personal car on the firm and the university refused to make an exception. Actually this is probably a point lost on judges (who are ferried to and from the courts at public expense) but it is the normal arrangement for people to pay to get themselves to work. The most interesting thing comes next, though. The judge said that Dr Wong could not have been motivated by greed, because the court had been told he had a personal fortune of $120 million.

Just a minute. Were we not just allowing in mitigation the fact that Dr Wong had forsworn the lucrative pastures of private practice to “serve the public”?  So where did this $120 million come from? It seems there are two possiblities. One is that Dr Wong came from such a wealthy background that he never needed to worry about money in the first place. The other is that a career serving the less fortunate in the corridors of Hong Kong U is not the exercise in Gandhian asceticism that judges may suppose it to be.

Well there we are, it’s done. No point griping. No doubt the prosecution will decide not to appeal. I cannot say there is much point in sending 70-year-old men to prison. On the other hand it doesn’t do much for 20-year-olds either, but judges do not seem to worry about this so much. I think two observations are in order. One is that judges should be more sceptical about the horrors of working in universities. Everyone who has had a real job before he became a tertiary teacher finds the lifestyle amazingly leisurely. Of course there is no shortage of academics who will tell you that they work really hard. These are the people who have never had a real job. Actually the money is pretty good and people who have marketable skills (like doctors and, ahem, journalists) can do paid work in their considerable free time.

The other point is that this mitigation thing should be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course counsel for the defendant has the right to make whatever points he can in favour of his client. And the defendant is entitled to ask his rich and influential friends to write letters saying what a wonderful chap he is. On the other hand at this point in the proceedings the usual adversarial safeguards are rather lacking. The speech in mitigation does not need to include any witnesses or evidence for its assertions. The flattering letters are not balanced by cross-examination of their writers or an opportunity for the prosecution to drum up letters saying that the wretched defendant is a greedy autocrat who deserves jail. A good case could be made for the view that an educator who steals is committing a serious offence because he is setting a deplorable example to his students. Indeed I believe that in cases where the defendant was younger or less prestigious this point has been made as an explanation for a more vigorous sentence. Justice must be seen to be done. Every time a member of the local establishment gets conspicuously gentle treatment in court a million onlookers conclude that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.  This is a point which seems to escape the Hong Kong judicial mind rather often.