Auckland-based criminal lawyer Jason Yang has been suspended for the “less than frank” statements he gave to police over a kidnapping and torture incident. Photo / LinkedIn
A lawyer who owned a nightclub was put between a “rock and a hard place” when he rescued an employee from being brutally tortured by one of his legal clients.
Auckland-based criminal lawyer Jason Yang has now been suspended for the “less than frank” statements he gave to police after the incident, which involved his employee being abducted by gang members and tortured with an electric drill.
In the early hours of a May morning in 2023, Yang received Instagram messages from one of his clients who had abducted the nightclub employee.
That employee had slapped the bottom of a woman whose partner was a Head Hunters gang member.
The victim was taken to a Helensville property where multiple men drilled holes in his shin and knee with an electric drill, burned his forehead with cigarette butts, cut him with a heated knife, poured boiling water on him and hit him with a metal pole.
Ultimately, seven men went on to plead guilty to the man’s abduction and torture, but it was Yang who came to the employee’s aid and liaised with the abductors for him to be released.
One of those men was a legal client of Yang’s for unrelated matters.
Yang took his employee to the hospital, where police, who were onsite for another matter, assumed he was involved and handcuffed him before taking him to the station for questioning.
Just before 4am, Yang signed his first written statement about what he claimed he knew about the incident.
In it, he “fudged” how he’d come to know about his employee’s plight and concealed that he knew one of the kidnappers.
Four days later, he amended that statement and provided additional information to police.
After the incident, the New Zealand Law Society levelled charges of misconduct against Yang, claiming that he took too long to amend his first statement.
The charges made their way to the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal, where Yang explained he was put in an extremely difficult position between acting for his client and acting for his employee.
Yang told the tribunal that when he made his first statement, he was unsure how much information was covered by attorney-client privilege and had been threatened by the abductors about making any disclosure to the police.
In a ruling released today, the tribunal accepted Yang was physically and emotionally distressed at the time and given the “unexpected and unprecedented circumstances” he was in, his confusion about his obligations regarding client privilege was understandable.
“In the cool light of hindsight, Mr Yang accepts he was not acting for a client when he made his first statement to police,” the tribunal said.
“We have considerable sympathy for Mr Yang at this point. This was not a textbook situation. He had undertaken considerable risk in obtaining release of the victim and, having succeeded, was now caught between a rock and a hard place.”
The tribunal said that it could criticise him for not fixing the situation sooner, but overall it had empathy for his “exquisite plight”.
It was acknowledged that his omission to provide all the information to police would have slowed their investigation, but he did so from a place of fear; from both being viewed as a suspect, and from the kidnappers.
Ultimately, the tribunal found no harm was done because he provided all the information to police four days later and convinced his client to come clean as well.
A standards committee of the Law Society that prosecuted Yang before the tribunal focused on the four-day delay between his police statements, noting that he came forward on the same day a search warrant was carried out at his home.
However, the tribunal said it was far less critical of the delay given the trauma he’d been through, and that he’d been taking active steps to help the police.
“The Standards Committee’s case has been suspicious and distrustful of Mr Yang. Because we find that he was working on his client and collating useful material, and because we find he intended to contact the police, we assess his position differently,” the tribunal said.
The standards committee also noted that in 2023, when the incident occurred, Yang was being investigated after trading DJ lessons for legal services and then trying to sue his client when they didn’t pay for an under-the-table job he tried to hide from his employer.
It said that given this investigation, which resulted in Yang being suspended from practice for a year, he should have been “on notice” about his conduct as a lawyer.
The tribunal dismissed this submission and said the facts of the case were “radically different” and said it struggled to see why it took such a negative view of his conduct.
“The case was serious, involving kidnapping and torture. On the other hand, we empathise with Mr Yang’s plight and, without totally forgiving him for his misconduct, we can well understand it,” the tribunal said.
“In some respects, Mr Yang emerges as a hero who secured release of a torture victim.
“Nevertheless, he made a statement to police that was less than frank.”
The tribunal said that despite its sympathy for Yang, a lawyer needed to be truthful with police, “particularly in a matter as grave as this one”, and that while it didn’t consider striking him off was necessary, some form of penalty was.
Ultimately, the tribunal opted to censure Yang, suspend him for three months and ordered him to pay nearly $13,000 in legal costs.
Yang declined to comment.
Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū, covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.