Malaysian professor whose wife, daughter suffocated by gas-filled yoga ball in Hong Kong wins final appeal against murder convictions
- Court orders retrial of case concerning death of Khaw Kim Sun’s wife and daughter from carbon monoxide poisoning
- Panel of top arbiters argues judge in 2018 trial offered up erroneous line of reasoning over absence of stopper in car where deadly yoga ball was placed
Hong Kong’s top court has quashed the murder convictions of a Malaysian professor whose wife and daughter were poisoned by a gas-filled yoga ball in their car 8½ years ago.
The Court of Final Appeal on Tuesday awarded Khaw Kim Sun another chance to clear his name by ordering a retrial over what prosecutors had argued was a meticulous murder plan by the anaesthesiologist.
The five presiding arbiters unanimously quashed Khaw’s convictions after finding the trial judge at the time had proposed an erroneous line of reasoning to the jury when she discounted the possibility that the appellant’s daughter had accidentally killed herself and her mother.
Khaw’s defence lawyer congratulated his client on Tuesday when the news was announced, but the appellant, who has been incarcerated for more than six years, did not visibly react to the court’s decision.
Khaw, now aged 59, was found guilty of two counts of murder over the deaths of his wife Wong Siew Fing, 47, and their second child Lily Khaw Li Ling, 16, on May 22, 2015.
The mother and daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning after a leaking inflatable ball containing a lethal amount of the gas was placed in the boot of their yellow Mini Cooper without anyone noticing.
Khaw, then an associate professor at Chinese University, claimed he had taken the carbon monoxide home to kill rats after a failed experiment on rabbits two days earlier.
Hong Kong court gives man convicted of yoga ball murders a chance to clear name
Defence lawyers initially suggested the late Lily Khaw might have used the carbon monoxide to commit suicide, but later dropped that contention and instead argued the teenager had intended to use the deadly gas to kill insects inside the car.
A nine-member jury returned a unanimous guilty verdict on both counts of murder in the 2018 trial, accepting Khaw being the culprit was the only reasonable inference to be drawn based on circumstantial evidence.
The Court of Appeal upheld Khaw’s convictions last year, before a final round of scrutiny at the top court over what appeared to be the trial judge’s mistake in her directions to the jurors.
Khaw’s defence team had argued that the judge overseeing the trial in 2018, Madam Justice Judianna Barnes, had prejudiced the jury against the defendant when discussing a missing piece of decisive evidence, the yoga ball’s stopper.
In summing up the case, Barnes at the time had urged the jury to disregard the possibility that Lily had put the yoga ball inside the Mini Cooper if the jurors accepted the stopper was never left inside the car.
The judge said the teenager would have no reason to dispose of the plug elsewhere if she had planned to use the gas to kill insects.
But the Court of Final Appeal on Tuesday said Barnes’ direction to the jury had effectively allowed them to ignore the possibility that the stopper was displaced or mistakenly removed from the car before a search of the vehicle was conducted half a year after the incident, especially when items in the boot had been moved before the check.
There was also no evidence to link the discovery of a stopper in one of Khaw’s drawers a year after the deaths to the yoga ball in the car, the court added.
The panel of judges said there was a risk that a false inference could have been made about the discovered stopper, adding that a retrial was necessary as the jury could have reached a different conclusion in the absence of the misguided direction.
Professor loses appeal against life sentence for yoga ball murders in Hong Kong
“The facts of this case are, on any view, most unusual,” the top court said.
“The mechanics of the alleged murders are exceptional, if not unique, and require a number of questions to be determined by the jury against the appellant if a conviction is to be supported.
“The evidence ought therefore to be assessed by a fresh jury on a retrial and not by the appellate court postulating the inevitability of conviction.”
Khaw is currently behind bars in Stanley Prison, a maximum security institution for male adult prisoners.
The Medical Council of Hong Kong deregistered the professor from both its governing lists of general practitioners and specialists in July 2020.
