After being convicted of attacking a policeman during the 2019 violent anti-Beijing protests in the semi-autonomous territory, Hong Kong-based American corporate lawyer Samuel Phillip Bickett (37) will spend four months and two weeks behind bars, according to The Washington Post.
The attack on the Senior Constable Yu Shu-sang in December 2019 occurred at a subway station in Hong Kong when Bickett, a former compliance director at the Bank of America, intervened in a confrontation between two men, one of which was off-duty policeman who was trying to stop a turnstile jumper using – according to Bickett- excessive force.
According to the police reports, the attacked officer suffered multiple injuries so the court magistrate Arthur Lam said Bickett’s behavior posed a “serious threat to public order,” adding 14 days to his sentence because the court concluded his actions may have incited other acts of violence.
Bickett announced an appeal after he was convicted of assault in June, arguing that the guilty verdict was “entirely unsupportable by both the law and the evidence in this case.”
After the sentence hearing, Bickett called the verdict “outrageous” and a violation of legal precedent, claiming that charges were pursued because he had embarrassed the police, something that was said by the former prosecutor in his case.
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