At least an additional 2.5 years will be spent behind bars for a Chinese national who performed an illegal and lethal breast augmentation procedure.
Earlier this year, a Sydney jury ruled that Jie Shao had illegally injected a lady with a fatal dose of anaesthesia, leading to her conviction for manslaughter.
The September 2017 treatment that included injecting hyaluronic acid as filler into Jean Huang’s breasts resulted in her death at the age of 35.
After being brought to the hospital, Huang’s life support was removed and she was eventually deemed brain dead.
Shao was calm during the entire court session today, but she choked back tears when she learned that Judge Timothy Gartelmann had given her a sentence of six years and nine months in prison, along with a three-year, six-month non-parole period.
Judge Gartelmann concluded that the evidence provided during the trial demonstrated her ignorance of the symptoms of a lidocaine overdose and the proper dosage to inject into a patient.
Over the course of the trial, skilled toxicologists concluded that, in relation to Huang’s body weight, she had injected about ten times the recommended dosage of lidocaine.
“The offender did not calculate the safe dosage for the deceased any reasonable person in the circumstances would have realised this is dangerous,” the judge stated.
The judge stated that even though Huang was exhibiting symptoms of an overdose seizure, Shao kept injecting her.
In the time, Australia had not approved the treatment, which Shao carried out in the Medi Beauty Clinic at Chippendale in inner-city Sydney.
Judge Gartelmann concluded that Shao’s guilty plea to a different allegation of recklessly giving a poison that endangers life indicated that she accepted some of the blame for the tragedy.
“She did not intend to kill the deceased or cause her really serious harm, it would be a case of murder if she had,” he stated.
“But she was at least reckless as to causing injury to the deceased.”
Huang’s husband and other family members expressed their sadness at her loss in victim impact statements that were read out in court, characterising Huang as a happy and joyful person.
Shao’s attorney Winston Terracini SC cited her as claiming she “blamed herself” in her own statement during sentence.
“Her departure will always be a part of me… I shouldn’t have accepted because I don’t know Australian customs,” Terracini cited his client as stating.
Shao was determined by Judge Gartelmann to be extremely unlikely to commit another crime and to have suffered severe anxiety and sadness during the case’s pending proceedings.
Shao’s earliest release date is December 2026 because she has already spent a year in custody, which will be deducted from her total sentence. The last day of her term is March 2030.
