by Coconuts Hong Kong
An elderly mainland Chinese woman was found guilty for stealing a life jacket from a Cathay Pacific aircraft on Monday, and fined HKD2,000. She claimed to believe that the life jacket was a keepsake for travellers to take home.
The woman, who hails from Shaanxi province in northwest China, was passing through Hong Kong on her way from Taiwan to Xi'an when security officials found the Cathay Pacific life vest (worth HKD360) stashed in her bags, according to.
The 64-year-old pleaded guilty at Tsuen Wan Magistrates' Court on Tuesday, even fainting at one point in court. The magistrate heard how the defendant's blood sugar was apparently low before she stressed her desire to return to Xi'an.
Magistrate Cheang Kei-hong said he did not believe the defendant was ignorant as she claimed, but rather simply greedy. He emphasised that stealing the life jacket was not a serious crime because of its monetary value, but because a passenger's life could have been jeopardised during an accident if its loss had not been discovered.
When the defence countered that in that scenario, the responsibility would lie with the airline to count the number of life jackets, the magistrate rebutted "even the airline couldn't predict that someone would be so out of order as to steal a life jacket," Apple Daily .
Oh, snap. #sassymagistrate
When the defendant was ordered to pay the HKD2,000 fine, she said she had less than HKD24 worth of Taiwanese currency on her person. The magistrate said that if she could not pay the fine within the day, she would be sent to jail for a week.
She later managed to procure the HKD2,000 from her husband (which apparently was not an option until the threat of jail became real), and Oriental Daily reports she was released later on in the day.
Photo: /(for illustration) stock image
http://hongkong.coconuts.co/2015/12/03/elderly-woman-takes-cathay-life-jacket-souvenir-fined-hkd2000
