A father jailed for strangling his wife in front of their 15-year-old son was wrongly convicted on the boy's testimony, which was riddled with lies, a court heard yesterday.
The claims were heard in the Court of Appeal as Ling Kam-wah launched a bid to clear his name.
In February, a Court of First Instance jury convicted Ling, 38, of manslaughter over the death of his wife Ho Wai-chun, 44, in their Mongkok flat on February 1 last year. The only witness to the crime was Ling Siu-tong.
He told the jury a row broke out when his mother refused to give his unemployed father money. Siu-tong said he saw his father slap his mother. He also testified that he saw his father appear to strangle his mother, with either his hands or in an arm-lock.
Defence counsel Andrew Raffell said he had tried to move an application of no case to answer during the trial, based on Siu-tong's inconsistent evidence. Yesterday Mr Raffell said the trial judge, Mr Justice Gareth Lugar-Mawson, had been wrong to refuse the application.
Mr Raffell told the court Siu-tong's evidence did not tally with forensic evidence, which showed Ho had died through the use of some form of thin ligature.
