刑事檢控科各律師/高級律政 - Department of Justice

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sentence considered her unsuitable for detention in a training centre.
However, the judge concluded otherwise and said:
Held :
Pregnant women are regularly imprisoned or found
to be pregnant after imprisonment. The authorities
have medical facilities and tailor work programmes
accordingly. The original concept of training centre
was that they were to be institutions short of
imprisonment, to which young persons could be sent
with a hope of reformation, and where they could be
kept apart from more hardened adult prisoners.
That principle, in my view, remains paramount and
the authorities should be prepared to tailor physical
activities and medical care to accord with pregnancy,
and not the other way round.
(1) Although it was true, as A1 submitted, that the judge did not
refer to the community service option in his sentencing remarks, that did
not mean that he did not consider it. The judge had to be assumed to
have concluded that community service was not, in this case, a viable
alternative to a custodial sentence, and he was right. In Chow Chakman
the Court of Appeal approved the guidance given by the English
Court of Appeal in R v Brown [1981] 3 Cr App R (S) 294 as to those
offenders who could be said to be best suited for a community service
order. Some of the features identified in that case could be said to
apply to A1, but the nature of his offences, in particular his involvement
at a professional level with vice activities and organised crime, took
away much of the benefit to be derived from his lack of previous
convictions hitherto and his previous work record;
(2) The judge did not err in sentencing A1 to detention in a training
centre. The nature of the offences he committed made a custodial
sentence inevitable, and although he was a real candidate for the strict
regime to be experienced in the training centre, on one view he was
lucky to avoid a sentence of imprisonment;
(3) Although detention in a training centre was also the most
appropriate way dealing with A2, her pregnancy meant that such a
disposal was less appropriate than would otherwise have been the case
for two reasons. First, the regime in the training centre was physically
demanding, and her condition would, for the first few months at any
rate, prevent her from firstly participating in the activities of the training
centre. Second, as said by Cross & Cheung, in ‘Sentencing in Hong
Kong’, 3rd ed, at p 465: