{"id":18419,"date":"2026-09-04T04:27:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T16:27:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=18419"},"modified":"2026-09-04T04:27:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T16:27:23","slug":"hakyung-lee-who-killed-her-children-has-non-parole-period-cut-from-17-to-10-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=18419","title":{"rendered":"Hakyung Lee, who killed her children, has non-parole period cut from 17 to 10 years"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A woman who\u00a0murdered her two children, stuffed their bodies into suitcases<\/a>\u00a0and abandoned them in a storage unit has had seven years taken off the time she must spend behind bars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hakyung Lee is still subject to a life sentence, but her minimum non-parole period has been cut from 17 years to 10.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The reduction has been made after the Court of Appeal noted there was a “stark” disparity between her sentence and that given to\u00a0Lauren Dickason, another mother who murdered her children<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Dickason is serving a sentence of 18 years for killing her three daughters<\/a>, but is eligible to apply for parole after only six years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a newly released decision, the Court of Appeal said it agreed with Lee’s lawyer that, in practical terms, this meant Lee was likely to be locked up almost three times longer than Dickason.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“We do not consider such different outcomes are warranted when applying the purposes and principles of sentencing,” the appeal court justices said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“We are therefore reinforced in our view that the sentence imposed on Ms Lee was manifestly unjust.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lee was found guilty last year of murdering her daughter Juna Jo, 8, and son Minu Jo, 6, inside the family’s Papatoetoe home in June 2018, months after her husband had died of cancer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She wrapped the children’s bodies in plastic, put them in suitcases and left them in storage before changing her name and moving overseas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The horrifying act wouldn’t be discovered until 2023, when the children’s corpses were found by a family who had won an auction for the contents of Lee’s abandoned storage locker.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Although she claimed repeatedly in the years that followed that she wasn’t responsible for the children’s deaths, Lee finally admitted just before her trial that she had intentionally given her children a fatal overdose of sleeping pills mixed with juice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"The<\/div>
The children Yuna Jo (left) and Minu Jo (right).<\/p>\n

Supplied<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Her defence at trial was that she was insane at the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The jury rejected this, and Lee was sentenced to life, with the extended non-parole period of 17 years, which can be imposed when there are aggravating factors in the case.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In sentencing Lee last November, High Court Justice Geoff Venning said he considered there were differences between her case and that of Dickason, who killed her daughters Lian\u00e9, 6, and 2-year-old twins Maya and Karla, in 2021 while suffering from depression.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Justice Venning said the apparently random and frenzied violence Dickason used showed that her case had to be viewed “in the context of the cognitive distortion and impaired judgment which not just contributed to her actions but in her case actually drove them”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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However, he said that, in Lee’s case, the evidence did not support a conclusion that her mental health struggles dominated or drove her actions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“You went about killing the children in a deliberate and calculated way and then took a number of steps to cover up your offending.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“I consider your case to be different to Ms Dickason’s.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Before the Court of Appeal, however, Lee’s counsel, Chris Wilkinson-Smith, said both women were suffering from severe mental health impairment when they killed their children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In both cases, the murders would not have occurred but for that disability, and the “brutality of Ms Dickason’s offending was, on any view, plainly more serious than Ms Lee’s”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Court of Appeal, comprising Justices Christian Whata, Andru Isac and David Johnstone, said Lee had tried to be a supportive and caring mother, despite the severity of her mental illness after her husband’s death.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“In contrast to other cases of filicide, there is no suggestion of physical or mental neglect or abuse,” the justices said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“Rather, the evidence indicates that, despite her difficulties, the appellant continued to try and meet the needs of her children.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“This included the purchase of foods they would find familiar or comforting and taking them on child-focused activities and holidays, including a holiday to Queenstown days before the offending.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They said that Lee would not have killed her children without the “dominating contributing factor” of mental illness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Without it, the children would be alive today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“We are therefore unable to accept the [sentencing] judge’s additional conclusion that the causative role of mental illness in the present case was materially different from that in Dickason,” the justices said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When Lee was sentenced, an order was made that she be detained as a special patient under the Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act 1992.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That order remains in force.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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*\u00a0This story originally appeared in the\u00a0<\/em>New Zealand Herald<\/a>.<\/p>\n

RNZ<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A woman who\u00a0murdered her two children, stuffed their bodies into suitcases\u00a0and abandoned them in a storage unit has had seven years taken off the time she must spend behind bars. Hakyung Lee is still subject to a life sentence, but her minimum non-parole period has been cut from 17 years to 10. The reduction has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":18420,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18421,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18419\/revisions\/18421"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}