Opinion | Joshua Wong: Serial offender in last chance saloon

By Grenville Cross

Although the criminal justice system hopes that offenders can be rehabilitated, there will always be recidivists. Whether through delinquency, greed or obsession, they learn nothing from their experiences, and carry on breaking the rules, although there are consequences. If an offender has a criminal record, this will usually affect the sentence he receives.

He cannot claim that the offense is out of character, or that it is a single fall from grace, particularly if the earlier offense is similar to the latest. In many situations, therefore, a previous conviction will be treated as an aggravating factor, as it shows the offender has persisted in crime, and that the previous sentence has failed to deter. If so, a significantly enhanced sentence may be unavoidable.

One notorious recidivist, the professional agitator, Joshua Wong Chi-fung, pleaded guilty in the District Court on May 6 to an offense of knowingly taking part in an unauthorized assembly, which is punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment. Even though a Letter of No Objection had not been issued by the police, given their concerns over COVID-19 transmission, Wong, his three co-defendants, and over 20,000 people gathered in Victoria Park on June 4, 2020, causing traffic disruption and public health risks.

Having given Wong a one-third discount for his guilty plea, Judge Stanley Chan Kwong-chi sentenced him to 10 months’ imprisonment, and his confederates to between four and six months’ imprisonment. He said the defendants had “openly defied the law”, and noted that Wong had no less than six previous convictions, three of which were of a similar nature. His criminal record showed that the earlier sentences had not discouraged him from lawbreaking, and a deterrent sentence was therefore required.

In fact, Wong has an ugly criminal record, in which violence, disrespect of the rule of law and even intimidation loom large, and, if anything, the sentence he received from Chan was on the lenient side. However, Chan would have had regard to the sentences he was already serving, and considered the totality principle in determining the final sentence. As Wong was already serving an overall sentence of 17.5 months’ imprisonment for other offenses, his total sentence now stands at 27.5 months’ imprisonment, which should give him pause for thought.

Indeed, when Wong was convicted of criminal contempt in 2019, he derisively dismissed the short prison term he received as “a piece of cake”, words upon which he will now have plenty of time to reflect. This apart, his actual release date is contingent on the outcome of the trial for conspiracy to commit subversion he is currently awaiting. What will now be blindingly obvious to him is that, no matter how much he enjoys grandstanding and dancing to the tune of China’s adversaries, he is not above the law. Justice has had the last laugh, and he has only himself to blame for spurning the earlier opportunities offered to him by the courts.

After his first conviction in 2016, for an unlawful assembly that involved a forcible invasion of the forecourt at the East Wing of the Central Government Offices in Admiralty, Wong, who was aged 17 at the time of the offense, was ordered by a magistrate to perform 80 hours of community service, which he duly underwent. In this, he was fortunate, as the Court of Appeal, which subsequently imprisoned Wong and his accomplices for a short period on review, described his crime as “a large-scale unlawful assembly involving violence” that left 10 security guards injured. Although community service is rehabilitative in nature and provides a chance of redemption, Wong spurned the lessons it provided, as well as those provided by the “short, sharp shock” of his two months’ imprisonment, and it has been downhill ever since.

Whenever a young person like Wong goes off the rails, it is always incumbent upon authority figures to counsel them, and encourage their rehabilitation. This, however, was not how the former governor, Chris Patten, saw his role. After learning that Wong and his co-defendants had been imprisoned by the Court of Appeal, Patten, instead of condemning their violence or sympathizing with their victims, described their punishments as “deplorable”. This, of course, would have encouraged them to think their outrages were legitimate, and given the green light for future political thuggery.

As for Wong, once he realized that the Pattens of this world would condone his lawbreaking, he duly embarked upon a crime spree, gleefully embracing his role as a proxy of foreign forces. His views were eagerly sought by the US consul general in Hong Kong, and the co-chairs of the US Congressional-Executive Committee on China, the China haters Senator Marco Rubio and James P. McGovern, even nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, albeit not disclosing his conviction for a crime which was anything but peaceful. With apologists like this egging him on, Wong turned his mind to fresh depredations against his home city.

One of his most despicable crimes occurred on June 21, 2019, and it again involved violence. Up to 9,000 protesters, spearheaded by black-clad militants, besieged the police headquarters in Wan Chai from 11 am to 3:45 am the next day, trapping many officers inside. The entrances were blockaded, walls vandalized, and surveillance cameras smashed. The public was greatly inconvenienced, as traffic was disrupted, bus and minibus services were redirected, and 61 emergency 999 calls went unprocessed. A baying mob occupied the environs, and six police officers were trapped in a police van for several hours.

In this criminal enterprise, Wong played a leading role. He helped to plan it, and the video evidence presented at his trial showed him telling accomplices at the scene that they should get others to join in and “completely besiege police headquarters”. One of the objectives was to pervert the course of public justice, by forcing the Department of Justice to drop the charges faced by those arrested for violence outside the Legislative Council Complex, and for the reclassification of the June 12 riot as a “non-riot”.

On Dec 2, 2020, justice finally caught up with Wong, at the West Kowloon Magistrates Court. After he was convicted on his own pleas of both organizing and inciting an unauthorized assembly, a deterrent sentence was unavoidable, not least because of the high levels of intimidation and disruption associated with his crimes. The court concluded that condign punishment was required to “safeguard public interests and the lives and property of the people”, and Wong was sentenced to 13 months two weeks’ imprisonment. As all could see, this punishment was richly deserved, but this did not prevent Patten from again seeking to whitewash a very serious crime, absurdly alleging that the sentences imposed were a “grim example of China’s determination to put Hong Kong in handcuffs”. As he well knows, attempts to paralyze police stations and create chaos would never be tolerated in the United Kingdom, and there is no reason why they should be countenanced in Hong Kong, and delusional drivel like this belongs, if anywhere, in cloud cuckoo land.

Earlier, on May 16, 2019, the Court of Appeal had approved a sentence of two months’ imprisonment for Wong for his role in obstructing the execution of a court order for the clearance of an occupied area of Mong Kok in 2014. The order was intended to enable people in the area to resume their normal lives, but Wong had other ideas. In sentencing him for criminal contempt, the judges said his actions were “tantamount to a direct and frontal challenge to the court”, and constituted “a direct challenge to Hong Kong’s rule of law”. Although Wong sought to laugh the sentence off, it was clear that he was now a serial offender who thought, like so many other criminals, that he was larger than the law, but he is now learning otherwise.

On April 13, 2021, moreover, Wong received four months’ imprisonment for participating in an unauthorized assembly and violating the anti-mask law. These offenses arose on Oct 5, 2019, which was the first day of the implementation of the new law designed to help the police to control the violent protests. The court described Wong’s crimes as preplanned, and he clearly thought he could do as he wished. By doing nothing to disabuse him of this notion, Patten has contributed directly to Wong’s downfall.

Indeed, Patten’s judgment has long since been warped by visceral Sinophobia, which is why he was recently appointed a patron of Hong Kong Watch, the anti-China propaganda outfit run by the serial fantasist Benedict Rogers. Once Rogers learnt that Judge Stanley Chan had sentenced Wong to 10 months’ imprisonment for his latest crime, he resorted to Patten-speak, describing the sentencing as “a new low in the diminishing of the city’s freedoms”. If this sounds bizarre, nobody should be surprised, as Rogers has an unhealthy infatuation with political deviants. He has even described Wong as his “hero”, a distinction he also conferred on the criminal fugitives Nathan Law Kwun-chung, Wong’s partner in crime, and Ted Hui Chi-fung, a conman with an appalling criminal record,who is wanted for crimes ranging from criminal damage to trying to pervert the course of public justice.

Although the precise length of Wong’s imprisonment has yet to be determined, he is now in the last chance saloon, and will hopefully take this opportunity to sort himself out. While incarcerated, he can pursue intellectual studies, and even learn a trade. He will need to realize that there is more to life than aggression and lawbreaking, and that once he is no longer of any use to them his foreign puppet masters will lose interest in him. If, however, he sees his future in serial offending, his prospects will be even less rosy than they are now.

The author is a senior counsel, law professor and criminal justice analyst, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR.

(Source:China Daily)

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