A man who bashed his former wife to death in front of his two daughters has failed to have his murder conviction overturned by the Court of Appeal.
Bai Liang Su, a market gardener of Levin, was sentenced to life in prison after a trial in the High Court at Napier last October.
Defence lawyer Russell Fairbrother appealed against Su's conviction on three grounds.
They were: new evidence, the conduct of his trial lawyer, and the judge's alleged misdirection in his summing-up for the jury.
The court had not been told that Su was suffering from a depressive syndrome when he bashed his wife's head into the ground in a Hastings carpark on March 20 last year.
Su's wife, Jiang, had left him in December 1999 and gone to live in Hastings with her uncle. Su made several visits in an attempt to get her back.
She was not interested. On the day of her death, while sitting in a car with their two daughters, she told him she was going back to her old boyfriend.
There was an argument and some pushing and shoving.
Su told police that she then fell down and he began shaking her with both hands around her neck.
As he shook her, the back of her head was hitting the tarsealed surface of the carpark.
When he saw that she was bleeding, he stopped and ran into a bakery shop, telling the shop assistant he had killed his wife.
At the trial, a pathologist gave evidence that Jiang's head was beaten a number of times on the car park surface with enough force to cause skull fractures and deep injury to the brain.
In yesterday's judgment, delivered by Justice Randerson, the Court of Appeal ruled that Su's trial had been fair and the appeal was dismissed.
- NZPA
Appeal court backs murder conviction
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.