US lawyer loses appeal over HK police scuffle

Bloomberg

A Hong Kong court upheld the conviction of an American lawyer handed a jail term over a scuffle with a plainclothes cop, in a case that fueled international debate over police tactics in the city.
High Court Judge Esther Toh said she found “no merit at all in any of the grounds of appeal against conviction,” in a judgment on Tuesday. Toh added that the actions of the plainclothes police officer had to be understood within the context of the 2019 protests, when hostility toward law enforcement led off-duty officers to be issued batons.
Samuel Bickett, 37, was sentenced to 4.5 months in jail in July on one count of assaulting a police officer. The former Bank of America Merrill Lynch compliance director said he was trying to stop an attack in a subway station by a man who denied he was a cop. He had been free on bail while awaiting his appeal.
Bickett cited Chief Justice Andrew Cheung’s remarks that the rule of law was secure in Hong Kong, saying that today’s verdict was “just the latest indication that the judiciary’s reputation for applying the law rationally, fairly and equally is in danger,” in a statement published to his Twitter account Tuesday. “I will appeal today’s decision and continue to fight to overturn the verdict.”
Mass Unrest
Hong Kong police tactics drew harsh criticism during mass anti-government protests two years ago, after a traffic cop shot a protester, officers pepper sprayed bystanders, and riot police slammed a Citigroup Inc. staffer to the ground. Officers maintained they used appropriate force at a time of rising violence, as protesters fielded Molotov cocktails, bricks and even flaming arrows.
Bickett, who said the officer was attacking people with a baton in a subway station, wrote in a statement before his conviction that the verdict was “entirely unsupportable by both the law and the evidence in this case.” In September, the US citizen took to Reddit to warn other expatriates living in the Asian financial center they could be targeted by police in the wake of a Beijing-drafted national security law passed in June 2020.