Getting Donald Tsang back in the dock for second retrial will be hard for Hong Kong prosecutors, legal experts say
After evidence failed twice to convince enough jurors, government lawyers will need to show a very good reason to keep bribery case alive
Prosecutors will need to weigh up this weekend whether they can convince a court to order a rare second retrial for a former Hong Kong leader, according to legal experts, after jurors failed to reach a verdict for a second time on a corruption charge.
Eight jurors were unable to come to a majority decision over whether Donald Tsang Yam-kuen was guilty of accepting an advantage as the city’s chief executive, between 2010 and 2012.
But doing so will be a big task for the government lawyers, observers said.
“It is in exceptional cases that a second retrial would be ordered when there was a hung jury in the previous two trials,” Eric Cheung Tat-ming, principal law lecturer at the University of Hong Kong, said.
Cheung said two key conditions would need to be met before another retrial. The offence would have to be of “extreme gravity”, and the evidence against the defendant “very powerful”.