Having at times been quite rude about Alex Lo I should perhaps in fairness record my admiration for and agreement with his piece this morning. This concerned the case of Shih Chiao-jen. Mr Shih is 73 years old and was in danger of losing his job as a security guard because of his age. So he bought a forged ID card on which he was 11 years younger. This eventually came to light and he was charged with possessing a fake ID card to commit an offence. And duly sentenced, by a magistrate, to four months in prison. After a public outcry the magistrate refused to change the sentence. “I don’t understand why there’s a public outcry,” he said. “But that’s understandable because they’re not lawyers.”
As Mr Lo rightly commented this is a poor theory. It is more likely that people objected because they were ordinary decent human beings. Actually if you are a connoisseur of legal matters you can see that the magistrate made an elementary error. He pointed out that the “starting point” for this offence is a jail term of 15 months, so four months represented “an abundance of human sympathy”. Not so. The “starting point” for offences emerges from comments by the Court of Appeal on attempts to overturn sentences as excessive or inadequate. Faced with a social problem the Court of Appeal tends to look like the man with a hammer to whom every problem looks like a nail. Deterrent sentences are applied, despite the massive amount of evidence that longer sentences do not deterr criminals. Still, the circumstances in which these norms are established are always relevant and the magistrate has ignored them. The offence of having a fake ID card dates back to the early 80s, when ID cards were introduced. The object of the exercise was to suppress unauthorised immigration from China. People who appeared before the courts for possessing fake ID cards were people who were not eligible for a real one. Clearly in such circumstances the offence was a blow at the very basis and reason for the introduction of ID cards. It is an elementary error to suppose that the sentencing habits emerging from such cases should be applied to the case of someone who was entitled to, and held, a real ID card, but wished to have one with a later date on it.
Pretty poor magisterial performance, if you ask me. But then the contribution of the prosecutor was hardly helpful. Mr Shih, opined the prosecutor, had “duped” multiple property managers. This is a preposterous theory. We must suppose that anyone who employed Mr Shih met him and had an opportunity to observe him in an interview and/or at work. They had ample opportunities to form their own estimates of his agility and alertness. No sane person would base his assessment of these matters on the age given on a person’s ID card. Property managers are not stupid. Wish I could say the same about lawyers.
tim's experiment 
I think the real injustice here is that Mr Shih was fighting age discrimination in which there is no legal or societal support. On the issue of the fake ID itself, I do think that the law should apply in all cases, but the mitigating circumstances (defending a natural right against ageism) might have been enough to have avoided a custodial sentence. It is right to look at the purpose of the law – gaining access to live in a country where you are not entitled to live is a material benefit. Gaining a job you are competent for in the face of age discrimination is not.
The technical legal issue aside (falsifying an official document), the real justice issue here is ageism itself, and the question is why Mr Shih felt he needed to resort to what he did in the first place. We are a long way off dealing this prejudice in Hong Kong, and you allude to it in your last paragraph. The man’s competency for the job was assessed and not found to be lacking. So, what’s his age got to do with it? If he was female, but pretended to be male because no firm would employ him on grounds of sex, or had we been dealing with a case of mistaken racial identity (e.g. no non HK-born Chinese need apply), would there not be an outcry in the counterfeiter’s defence? The “duped” comment from the prosecutor implies that no further evidence for incompetence for the job need be given but his real age. Where is the justice in that?