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Judge's niece Bokhary released from prison

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She did the crime, and now she's done the time.

Amina Mariam Bokhary was yesterday released from jail after serving four weeks of a six-week term.

Shortly after 8am the judge's niece trudged across the grounds of the Tai Lam Centre for Women masked and in prison clothes and carrying with her the belongings with which she entered the prison in Tuen Mun a month earlier. Less than an hour later she was through the gates, whereupon a car whisked her off to an unknown location.

Bokhary, 34, the niece of Mr Justice Kemal Bokhary, a judge of the city's highest court, the Court of Final Appeal, became the subject of public opprobrium after magistrates three times spared her from imprisonment for assaulting police officers. She finally ended up in jail after breaching five of the seven conditions of a probation order handed down by Magistrate Anthony Yuen Wai-ming in August.

One of those conditions was that she spend three months at the Betty Ford Centre for alcohol rehabilitation in California, but she left the US centre after 78 days. The breaches prompted Eastern Court to change her sentence to six weeks in jail. She was freed after serving two-thirds of the sentence.

Yuen's initial decision to sentence Bokhary to probation prompted a public outcry and concerns that the courts showed leniency to well-connected defendants.

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