Innocent until proven guilty | The Fine Print | Victor Dawes SC

Every era produces its own species of villain. When I first joined the Bar – long before the age of YouTube and Netflix – the “fashionable” crime then was not hacking, but hawking, particularly of pirated DVDs. The arcade malls of Sham Shui Po were often laden with makeshift kiosks, stacked high with pirated discs of films barely out of cinemas. This was Jack Sparrow with a Hong Kong flavor – piracy conducted under fluorescent lights, between a bakery and a second-hand mobile phone shop.

These stalls were seldom manned by captains of industry; criminal syndicates preferred men with frayed resumes, former convicts or drug addicts, pliable individuals, to front their high-risk operations. One of my earliest cases serving my pupil master concerned such a gentleman – arrested by the Customs red-handed, arriving at our chambers protesting innocence. To my inexperienced eye, the case appeared straightforward: man caught behind the kiosk, discs and cash within reach, consequences inevitable.

My pupil master thought otherwise. With surgical calm, he dissected the prosecution’s case. The chain of custody proved wobbly; exhibits were poorly handled; statements imprecise. Reasonable doubt slipped in through those cracks, and our client was ultimately acquitted.

Nonetheless, I struggled with the result: it appeared that we freed a man who was apparently guilty.

Sensing my unease in our taxi ride back to chambers, my pupil master said, “If it were obvious that our client did it, the prosecution would not have lost.”

“It is not our job to judge our client. He is innocent until proven guilty.” The burden, he reminded me, rests entirely on the prosecution. If evidence is sloppy or procedure defective, liberty must prevail. “You worry that a guilty man walked free,” he said. “Consider the greater tragedy: an innocent man, widely suspected, convicted because everyone was too prejudiced to fight for his innocence.”

Victor Dawes SC is the former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association