By Dorcas Ting
KUCHING, Oct 21: A husband and wife who forced a woman into sex work to settle a debt of just RM800, then strangled her to death, will remain on death row after the Federal Court threw out their last appeal today.
Seow Pei Chee, 44, from Subang Jaya and her husband Cheung Chia Ming, 44, from Kuala Lumpur had sought to have their sentences reduced, but a three-judge panel comprising Justice Azizah Nawawi, Justice Rhodzariah Bujang and Justice Collin Lawrence Sequerah unanimously refused.
In the Federal Court’s decision, Justice Collin said the panel weighed the full circumstances of the case and the public interest. He pointed out that the victim, Heng Heow Lin, 38, was in a vulnerable position, was continuously abused and strangled, and that her body was then stuffed into luggage and discarded by the roadside.
Such circumstances, he said, were aggravating and outweighed any mitigating factors.
He noted that although the mandatory death penalty was scrapped through legal amendments in 2023, courts now have the discretion to impose either death or life imprisonment in appropriate cases.
Given the seriousness of the killing and the way it was carried out, the panel was unanimous that death was the right sentence for both, and it also endorsed the Court of Appeal’s earlier decision.
The victim was a cook from Perak who relocated to Sibu in March 2016 with her then 16-year-old daughter and moved in with the couple. She was a cousin of one of them and had borrowed RM800 from the pair.
The court heard that as the mother and daughter struggled to repay the money, they were subjected to mental and physical abuse. The couple, who were also known as “Ah long Harimau”, pushed both into prostitution, kept the earnings and beat them whenever the sum collected was too little.
Between Oct 4 and 6, 2020, at a house in Jalan Tong Sang, Sibu, the abuse on Heng worsened until she was strangled with a red cloth. Her body was packed into a luggage bag along with a note suggesting she had killed herself, and the bag was left along Jalan Aman.
Members of the public found it at about 6.30am on Oct 6. Her daughter managed to escape.
The High Court sentenced the couple to death on July 31, 2023, for murder under Section 302 of the Penal Code, read together with Section 34. The Court of Appeal dismissed their appeals on March 10 this year.
At the Federal Court hearing, Deputy Public Prosecutor Allan Suman Pillai prosecuted, while the couple were represented by court-appointed lawyers Jong Yee Ling and Datuk Candida Entri. – DayakDaily
