A Hong Kong woman sentenced to life imprisonment over the murder of two relatives has lost her appeal against her conviction at the city’s top court.
The Court of Final Appeal upheld the High Court’s verdict in the trial of Ada Tsim on Wednesday. The 49-year-old, who reportedly worked as a bodyguard in mainland China, was found guilty of two counts of murder and two counts of shooting with intent to do grievous bodily harm in 2021.
The top court’s decision came six years after Tsim was arrested over a fatal shooting at a Quarry Bay park, which left two of her elderly relatives dead and two other relatives injured. She was accused of gunning down the four with a semi-automatic pistol after a family lunch.
Local media outlets reported at the time that she and her relatives had disagreed over how to share the proceeds from the sales of her late grandmother’s apartment.
Her aunt and uncle died, while two other relatives were hospitalised. The four victims were siblings.
Handing down the verdict on Wednesday, the top court’s five-judge panel ruled that the burden of proving Tsim’s “diminished responsibility” – a legal argument meaning the defendant’s mental functions were impaired at the time of the offence – was on the defence.
During the appeal hearing, the defence had argued that it was unfairly required to prove diminished responsibility, and it infringed on the presumption of innocence principle. It should be sufficient for the defendant to offer evidence to support the issue of diminished responsibility, and for the prosecution to disprove it, the defence said.
The Court of Final Appeal judges, however, said that placing the onus on the defence to prove diminished responsibility did not “engage or derogate from the presumption of innocence.”
A defendant who pursued diminished responsibility as a line of defence should be expected to prove it, the judges said, because if that defence failed they were liable to be convicted of murder. “That is to say, the prosecution will already have done enough to prove the elements of murder beyond reasonable doubt,” the judges wrote. “The defendant is not therefore someone presumed innocent at the point of invoking the partial defence.”
Under Hong Kong law, the fixed sentence for anybody convicted of murder is life imprisonment.
Tsim had earlier attempted to appeal against her conviction at the Court of Appeal, but her application was rejected.
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