Convictions quashed for Khaw Kim Sun as Hong Kong’s top court orders ‘yoga-ball murder’ retrial

Hong Kong’s top court has on Tuesday quashed the convictions of former associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Khaw Kim Sun over the so-called yoga-ball murder of his wife and daughter in 2015 and ordered a retrial. 

Khaw, also a senior medical officer at the Prince of Wales Hospital, was convicted of two counts of murder by the High Court jury unanimously in 2018 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. 

The charges alleged Khaw of murdering wife Wong Siew Fing, 47, and daughter Lily Khaw Li Ling, 16, by placing a carbon monoxide-filled yoga-ball in Wong’s yellow Mini Cooper on May 22, 2015. 

Khaw had filed an appeal in 2022 but was rejected. He then took his case to the Court of Final Appeal which was granted this June. 

Khaw’s side argued that police only investigated the yoga-ball in the car and searched for the stopper about half a year later. During that period police didn’t find anything, and only found a stopper in a drawer in Khaw’s room a year later. 

The defense believe that the original judge misled the jury into thinking that the stopper had gone missing when the case occurred as the judge didn’t mention while guiding the jury that the exhibit officer couldn’t find the stopper. 

In the written judgment released today, Chief Justice Andrew Cheung Kui-nung, Permanent Judges Roberto Ribeiro, Joseph Fok, Johnson Lam Man-hon and Non-Permanent Judge Beverley McLachlin unanimously quashed Khaw’s convictions and ordered a retrial on the charges of murder. 

They said the original judge failed to refer to important relevant circumstances when applying process of deduction based on the relevance of the missing stopper to assess the possibility of Lily using the carbon monoxide to kill insects in the car. 

“We have come to the conclusion that her [the original judge’s] directions regarding the stopper could have steered the jury towards an impermissible line of reasoning in rejecting the possibility of Lily using the carbon monoxide to kill insects,” they said. 

They also pointed out that “there were other yoga balls in the house, a spare stopper found in the drawer could not by itself be a matter of significance. 

“It did not have strong probative value in terms of proving that Khaw was the person who put the yoga ball in the Mini Cooper on May 22, 2015.” 

The five top judges also said the original judge gave misdirections to the jury to eliminate Lily as a possible candidate as to who put the yoga-ball in the car, and Khaw “was deprived of a fair trial.”