Australian under death sentence

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32566, 27 March 1971, Page 8

Australian under death sentence

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) HONG KONG, March 25. A young Australian is under the shadow of sentence of death in Hong Kong, a Supreme Court jury having found him guilty of murdering a British scientist

Graham Edwards, aged 19, of Perth, pleaded not guilty to murdering the scientist, Dr Ronald Alan Coombe, aged 35, deputy director of the West Australian Institute of Technology, who was found stabbed dead in his Hong Kong hotel room on December 1. The five men and two women on the jury took just over four hours to reach their verdict.

The Chief Justice (Sir Ivo Rigby) did not put on the traditional black cap to pronounce the death sentence. Although Hong Kong still has capital punishment, murderers have had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment in the last few years. Edwards still has the right to. appeal to the Court of Appeals. The prosecution said that Edwards came to Hong Kong on a mission to kill Dr Coombe, who had cited him in divorce proceedings. Edwards said he came to blackmail Dr Coombe with a photograph showing him and other people in a perverted sex act. Edwards admitted killing Dr Coombe but, said that the scientist attacked him first, with a knife. The Chief Justice, summing up, told the jury that if they believed Edwards story of the blackmail attempt, or thought it might reasonably be true, they might feel that it disposed of the prosecution’s case of premeditated murder. "You may well think that

if this young man came with the deliberate intentions of committing murder, he would have made a better job of it than inflict 27 stab wounds on a man already in his pyjamas and receive serious injuries himself," he said, adding that the jury might think Edwards was “an unscrupulous, unmitigated scoundrel,” but he was charged with murder, not blackmail.