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The court of appeal has slammed the Department of Justice for prosecuting a possibly innocent man while sparing the real offender.

The judges - Andrew Macrae, Derek Pang Wai-cheong and Kevin Zervos - freed 25-year-old restaurant worker Ma Ka-kin who was wrongly convicted and jailed for 23 years in a drug trafficking case.

Ma was found guilty of trafficking dangerous drugs in 2019.

He spent five years in jail.

The court heard that in 2016, Ma allowed a former colleague, Hung Chi-him, to use his address to receive a package, which was found to contain about a kilogram of cocaine worth HK$1.9 million.

However, Ma said he did not know that the package contained drugs.

The prosecution dropped the charges against Hung, who was initially a co-defendant, even though 20 packets of cocaine were found at Hung's home.

On Wednesday, the judges said that the case "does not reflect well on the legal profession or the legal system" and slammed the Department of Justice for allowing "manifest injustice" to happen.

"It must have been obvious after the finding of the 20 packets at Hung's home that he was clearly more involved in this matter than Ma, who was of good character," they said.

A University of Hong Kong legal scholar, Eric Cheung Tat-ming, who helped Ma in his appeal, said Ma got his legal team through an introduction by Hung's relatives.

The person following up the case was not even a solicitor, but a solicitor's clerk who had criminal records, Cheung said.

Judges slam 'manifest injustice'