A former university professor whose conviction for murdering his wife was overturned has been sentenced to seven years and four months in prison for the lesser offence of manslaughter, after a Hong Kong court accepted that his depression was so severe that it reduced his criminal culpability.
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Cheung Kie-chung pleaded guilty at the High Court on Tuesday after prosecutors accepted that his mental condition had substantially diminished his responsibility for the killing that shocked academia in 2018.
The 61-year-old defendant had admitted to strangling his wife to death at their residence at the Wei Lun Hall of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where he served as warden, on August 17 that year.
Lawyers for the former associate professor of HKU’s department of mechanical engineering argued that his depression was so severe that it substantially impaired his ability to make rational judgments when he killed Tina Chan Wai-man, 53, the mother of his two children.
Prosecutors originally rejected that contention, resulting in a gripping 11-day trial that ended with a jury finding the defendant guilty of murder and the court sentencing him to mandatory life imprisonment.
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The Court of Appeal overturned that ruling last year on the grounds that the trial judge, at the defence’s behest, mistakenly asked the jury to disregard psychological evidence in support of Cheung’s argument that he was suffering from an abnormality of the mind at the time of the offence.