Court increase molester's jail term

[MarrickG]

HE WAS supposed to have been released from jail today, but former TV actor and model agency owner Mark Chow Yee Sze, who was convicted of molesting two women, will now see the inside of a prison until next year.

A High Court judge increased his jail time yesterday, after the prosecution succeeded in its appeal for his initial sentences to be enhanced.

Chow, in orange prison garb, apologised to the court, and pleaded with the judge not to send him back to jail when he was so close to being released.

“I am very remorseful, and it’s my first time in prison... I have to be home to take care of my elderly grandma and my sister,” he said.

But his plea fell on deaf ears.

Noting that the earlier sentences on the two counts of molest were “manifestly inadequate”, Justice Steven Chong increased Chow’s jail time to a total of 18 months – almost four times the original sentence.

Chow had been serving a four-month sentence for molesting an aspiring model in 2006, plus four more weeks because he could not pay the $6,000 fine for molesting another woman in 2007.

Justice Chong increased both sentences to nine months’ jail each.

On replacing the fine, Justice Chong said that as long as a victim’s intimate parts were intruded upon, the offence would warrant a jail term, as well as caning, unless it was minor.

Noting a “complete absence of mitigating factors”, Justice Chong said that the act had not been fleeting but lasted, according to CCTV footage, about 21/2 minutes.

In that time, Chow touched various parts of a former pub operations manager’s body, and put his hand inside her blouse, while she was asleep on a couch in an office.

The act was “deliberate”, said the judge, and Chow had shown no remorse by claiming trial, even though his actions had clearly been captured on CCTV.

On Chow’s second conviction, for caressing the left breast of an aspiring model in the unisex toilet of a downtown bar, Justice Chong highlighted other charges taken into consideration, such as pinching the woman’s buttocks several times, and brushing his hand across her cleavage.
After the sentence was laid down, Chow asked the judge for one last chance to “prove his innocence”.

When that plea was rejected, he was quietly led out of the dock.