Hong Kong's High Court
I had jury duty in Hong Kong recently, my first time ever in any country. Quite a fascinating experience, actually.
All About Heroin
It was a drug trafficking case. Here’s a quick rundown of the facts:
In April last year police raided the defendant’s home in the upper middle-class Pokfulam district. They discovered in his spare bedroom 320 grams of heroin, which has a street value in Hong Kong of about US$50,000.
They also found caffeine and other substances that dealers normally use to dilute heroin and increase profit margins. Inside a large, red-checkered plastic bag they saw equipment typically used to make heroin, including a disassembled blender, metal molds and various utensils. Also discovered was a sack full of clear plastic bags typically used to pack heroin for retail sale, and a lighter that could be used to seal the bags. All of these items were found together, mostly lying out in the open around a writing desk.
The accused — an ordinary-looking 51-year old — claimed to have never seen the items before and had no idea who had placed them in his flat, a 1000 square foot, three-bedroom unit which he shared with his wife and youngest son. His entire defense was based on the notion that visitors to the flat may have left the stuff at his place. The only problem was, there was no evidence that he ever had any visitors.
Selecting the Jurors
I was one of seven jurors selected by the barristers from the pool of potential jurors summoned to the court on the first day of the trial.
Potential jurors were called one at a time to the front of the court for evaluation by the barristers. Each barrister could reject up to five potential jurors on sight.
You aren’t supposed to take a barrister’s rejection personally because the barrister has never met you before, knows nothing about you and doesn’t get a chance to interview you (at least not in the case I was involved in). Still, it can’t be a good feeling to be rejected. As you return to your seat, you feel everyone’s eyes on you, wondering why you were turned down. Are you too dumb-looking? Too fat? Too hip?
The defending barrister used up his entire quota of rejections. Intriguingly, all of the people he turned down were women. He did accept one female into the seven-person jury, but probably just to make the gender bias less obvious.
Jurors had to show up at 10:00 a.m. every day and were dismissed at around 4:30 p.m., with a 90-minute lunch and a couple of breaks in between. We received a daily allowance of US$45. For lunch and the breaks, we were free to leave the premises and go anywhere we liked. The only time we were locked in a room and cut off from the outside world was when we deliberated the verdict.
Don’t Talk to Strangers
Something very curious was that the jurors – all educated, white collar Hong Kong professionals – didn’t say a word to each other until the afternoon of the second day.
Prior to that, during breaks and other occasions when we spent time together in the juror’s room, there was dead silence. Everyone just sat there completely still, avoiding eye contact and pretending that the others didn’t exist. The silence was all the more deafening because the juror’s room was soundproofed. As a result, even a minor physical act like someone getting up to go to the bathroom became a big deal — “Oooh, look at that, someone MOVED and made a rustling noise!”
Hong Kong people are notorious for being less-than-friendly to strangers but this was just too bizarre and silly for me: seven adults playing a game of “let’s see how long we can go without acknowledging each other’s existence”. By the afternoon of the second day I couldn’t stand it anymore and broke the ice with some inane comment. As it turns out, this was a relief to almost everyone and you couldn’t shut some people up after that.
Alien Barristers
Walking into the courtroom on the first day, something felt oddly surreal. After settling in, I realized it was the two barristers who were giving me this feeling (the judge had not yet emerged into the courtroom).
Barrister's Wig
Partly it had to do with their quaint wigs and robes, a legacy of the British legal system. I’d seen barristers and judges wearing them in photos and TV shows but never in person. Being an American, I felt it was faintly ridiculous for grown men to wear these things while doing serious work.
The odd feeling was amplified because the two barristers also happened to look strikingly alike — elderly British men with dour, ashen faces wearing nearly identical wire-rimmed spectacles and sitting almost side by side. They had a remote and aloof presence, seemingly alien to everything and everyone else in the courtroom.
Interestingly, the week after the trial, the South China Morning Post ran a feature article on Hong Kong’s barristers, describing them as an elite class who spent much of their lives sequestered in quiet, lamp-lit offices surrounded by plush chairs, dark-wood furniture and thick, leather-bound books. Well, that goes a long way to explain what I felt looking at the two barristers.
John Cleese is in the House
Though they looked like clones of each other, the two barristers in the case couldn’t have been more different in terms of professional ability. The defending barrister was impressive, but the prosecuting barrister was, to my surprise, bumbling and incompetent. On three occasions the judge, a charming Brit with a razor sharp mind, stunned the courtroom by berating the prosecuting barrister in front of everyone.
On one of these occasions, the prosecuting barrister had called to the witness stand an expert on the production of illicit drugs. This witness, the barrister had announced, was going to physically demonstrate how the various items in the red checkered bag fit and worked together to produce heroin.
But then the barrister, in his plodding, stuttering way, started to ask the witness a lot of minutely detailed questions about the nature and purpose of each piece of equipment.
He went on and on for several minutes until the judge abruptly cut him off and said with exasperation, “Mr. Whitmore, you’ve told us that Mr. Lau would be demonstrating to us how the various pieces of equipment fit and worked together to produce the drug, so why not proceed directly to that rather than have Mr. Lau tell us about how the items work together in theory?”
“Oh, yes, yes, my lord,” the barrister stammered, “you do have a point. Uh, well, in that case….let’s have the court clerks bring the actual exhibits to the witness table, shall we?”
The clerks then created a minor ruckus shuffling over to the table containing all the exhibits, sifting through them to identify the relevant items, hauling them over to the witness table and cutting open the double layer of plastic bags that each item was carefully wrapped in. There were about a dozen items in all so it looked like this was going to take a while.
As this was going on the defending barrister suddenly stood up and said, “My lord, I don’t think there is any need to go through this exercise at all. The expert witness has previously provided written testimony that the various items in the red checkered bag fit together and could work together to produce the drug. This is already accepted evidence in the case. The Defense is not contesting these facts.”
The judge arched an eyebrow. “Well, thank you for clarifying the matter, Mr. Grassley”. Then he turned to the prosecuting barrister and said acerbically, “Mr. Whitmore, given what the Defense has just said, do you have any reason at all to proceed with this rather elaborate exercise?”
The prosecuting barrister swallowed hard and replied, “Uh, well, in that case, my lord, p-perhaps we can omit this demonstration after all.” A murmur arose in the courtroom.
“Fine,” glowered the judge, “then let’s move on.”
The clerks then created another ruckus shuffling back to the witness table, clearing it of the cut-open plastic bags and ferrying the exhibits back to their original location. Essentially, then, everything that occurred in the previous ten minutes had been a complete waste of time.
This is frigging unbelievable, I thought to myself, it’s like I’m watching a live taping of the Monty Python show!
The Verdict
After two days of courtroom testimony, the judge sent us off for the verdict. He encouraged us to return a unanimous vote, although a 6-1 or 5-2 vote was also permitted.
We deliberated the case for about 90 minutes and unanimously found the defendant guilty as charged.
After reaching our decision, one of the jurors — a wiry guy in his 40′s who wore black plastic-framed glasses and had a habit of giggling whenever something controversial or sensitive was discussed — gingerly suggested that perhaps we should submit a 6-1 vote to the court instead of a unanimous one. The rest of us gave him a puzzled look and asked him why.
“Well,” he said, “this guy, you know, might not be acting alone, right? He might even belong to a triad, right?” Giggle. “He might want to, you know….get back at us for convicting him.” He paused for effect as we digested this startling thought.
Then he continued, “If it’s a unanimous vote, then there’s no question about who voted to convict the guy — every one of us did. But if we make it a 6-1 vote, you see, we might be able to better protect ourselves because there will always be some doubt about who — “
Before he could finish, a couple of us stopped him. We knew where he was going with this and weren’t interested. There was something very unethical about manipulating the vote, for whatever reason. Turns out this weasel works for the Hong Kong civil service, which is renowned for weaselly behavior.
Later in the afternoon, after everything had wrapped up and we were just sitting around chatting one last time before going our separate ways, another juror revisited the issue again just for discussion’s sake. He said, “Would you guys have rejected the idea of submitting a 6-1 vote out of hand if we were living in the corrupt Hong Kong of the 1960’s, or if we were doing this in China?”
Hmmm……………….
The Sentence
Partly because of the unanimous verdict, the judge gave the defendant the maximum sentence of 17 years. He pointedly noted to the defendant that “if you had committed this crime in almost any other country in Asia, you would’ve gotten the death sentence.” Throughout the trial, there’d been moments when I was reminded of the heavy responsibility shouldered by jurors. This was one of those moments.
At this point we also learned for the first time that the defendant was in fact a repeat offender, having just gotten out of jail for the same crime four months before this latest incident. You wonder why he was so foolish as to commit this crime again. He was fairly well-off already, lived in a nice neighborhood and had been able to send all three of his kids to study in Canada. Now he was going to spend pretty much the rest of his life behind bars and apart from his family.
Final Thoughts
Stepping out of the courthouse and into the afternoon sun after the trial, I thought about something the judge had said to all of us prior to jury selection on the first morning.
With a warm, charming glint in his eye, he had been making us laugh by chiding us good-naturedly about all the schemes and excuses to get out of jury duty that he knew were running through our heads.
Then he paused and said, “You should also consider, however, that serving on a jury is not only every citizen’s duty, it is also a privilege. The rule of law is, after all, one of the things that makes Hong Kong unique and has made us successful and prosperous. We all sleep easier at night knowing that our legal system is there to protect us and our families. Serving on jury duty, then, is how you can personally contribute to the rule of law. So I sincerely hope that you’ll value this unique opportunity.”
After my three days in court, I came to better understand what he meant – in spite of the bumbling barrister and the weaselly juror!
Lao Cai–
Very interesting and entertaining! I’ve heard that judges–at least in the U.S.–are in fact usually civil, so the chiding of the barrister sounds like it was deserved, and reserved for only those who need it. Makes sense. I assume that you did not point and laugh at the barristers for the wig-wearing ways–very restrained of you–good job on that. I’m really curious to learn more about this weaselly juror you sat with. What’s his story, anyway? Sounds like a real weasel, that one.
Well done, Lao Cai. I enjoyed this.
Thanks for the comments. The jurors didn’t spend a lot of time talking about personal matters, so I didn’t learn too much about that government worker. But throughout the trial, he was the juror I respected least, even before he came out with the request to manipulate the vote. He just seemed to be slippery and less-than-principled.