Asian Legal History – Penalties of Empire: Capital Trials in Colonial Hong Kong (Dr. Chris Munn, Honorary Associate Professor, University of Hong Kong)

Abstract

‘We must have a procedure – if we are going to hang anyone – that is just,’ said Chief Justice Sir Francis Piggott in 1909, on discovering that Chinese persons accused of murder were being denied interpretation in Hong Kong’s courts. Due process, no matter how costly or inconvenient, was ‘one of the penalties of empire,’ he declared.

Penalties of Empire explores how judges, juries and lawyers strove to deliver justice during the 150 years when the death penalty was in force in Hong Kong. Nine main chapters focus on key capital trials in the first century of British rule. Among the cases are piracies, assassinations, crimes of passion, and murders committed from desperation. These chapters describe the proceedings and participants in court. They also examine the public debates surrounding each case and the exercise of mercy by governors. Two final chapters discuss the decline of the death penalty after World War II, its suspension after 1966, and the controversies leading to its formal abolition in 1993. Penalties of Empire traces the evolution of criminal justice at its highest levels. It also offers a prism for understanding some of the broader forces at work in Hong Kong’s history.

Speaker: Christopher Munn is an honorary associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. His other publications include Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong, 1841–1880 (2001), A Special Standing in the World: The Faulty of Law at the University of Hong Kong, 1969-2019 (2019), and (with May Holdsworth) Crime, Justice and Punishment in Colonial Hong Kong (2020). He served as an administrative officer in the Hong Kong government 1980-1992 and in various positions in the Hong Kong Monetary Authority 1998-2010. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Toronto.