A Hong Kong court has handed down a six-month hospital order to a woman with an intellectual disability after finding her guilty of gouging her sister’s eye out last month.
After hearing witness statements and evidence from experts, magistrate Lam Tsz-kwan convicted Ma Wai-king, 59, of one count of inflicting grievous bodily harm, and accepted recommendations by psychiatrists to send her to the Castle Peak psychiatric hospital, Ming Pao reports.
Ma Wai-king assaulted her bedridden sister, Ma Wai-kuen, 66, on April 30. Wai-king is the youngest of three sisters who lived together in an apartment in Tai Hang, where the incident took place.
The newspaper reports that the defendant’s second eldest sister, Ma Wai-chong, 64, told the Eastern Magistrates Court today that she remembered helping the defendant go to the toilet at 1am that morning before going back to bed, but was woken up at 4am by screams coming from her eldest sister’s room.
She told the court she found blood in the living room, and saw that her eldest sister’s left eyeball was hanging out of its socket.
Lau Siu-ki, the emergency room doctor who tended to Wai-keun after she was rushed to the hospital, also testified as an expert.
He told the court that they found traces of a fingernail on the cornea of the left eye, close to the pupil, and that the vitreous — the clear gel that fills the space between the lens and the retina of the eyeball — had flowed out.
He added that given that the victim is bedridden, it’s wasn’t implausible that Wai-king had been able to gouge out the eyeball with her bare hands.
Ming Pao reports that the defendant was flanked by three female police officers, and was seen fidgeting in the dock throughout the proceedings, and at several points was physically restrained by the officers.
The decision comes after the court heard that the defendant has the mental age of a 21-month-old child, and was therefore unfit to enter a plea.
