Guilty verdict in Auckland filicide forces hard questions about mental illness, accountability and community care
The Auckland High Court delivered a short, stark verdict last week: Hakyung Lee, a New Zealand citizen born in South Korea, was found guilty of murdering her two young children and hiding their bodies in suitcases. The image of the remains — Yuna Jo, 8, and Minu Jo, 6 — discovered in a storage unit in south Auckland after years missing, jolted a country and prompted painful public debate about how societies respond when a parent takes the lives of their own children.
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Lee was extradited from Seoul in 2022 after the suitcases were located. Her trial did not pivot on whether she committed the killings — she had confessed — but on whether, at the time, she knew what she was doing was morally wrong. That narrow legal question sits at the heart of any insanity defence and it is one that juries and judges reluctantly confront when crimes collide with mental illness.
The trial and the verdict
Confession, psychiatry and a jury’s quick decision
Prosecutors painted a picture of deliberate concealment and flight. “Ms Lee deliberately, and in sound mind, deliberately murdered Minu and Yuna and the right verdict is guilty of murder,” Crown prosecutor Natalie Walker told the court in her closing summary. The jury needed only two hours to reach that conclusion.
For the defence, the narrative was different. Lee’s lawyers argued she was not guilty by reason of insanity, saying the death of her husband in 2017 sent her into a depression that altered her capacity to understand the moral weight of her actions. A forensic psychiatrist who gave evidence for the defence spoke of deep depression, suicidal ideation, overwhelming guilt and, chillingly, the defendant’s belief that she was doing what was morally right by ending her children’s lives.
In summing up, Justice Geoffrey Venning acknowledged the fraught emotions the case evokes. “It’s natural to feel sympathy for the young children who were killed,” he told jurors. “It’s also natural to feel someone should be held responsible for their deaths. On the other hand, some of you may feel sympathy for the defendant.” He urged them to weigh the evidence rather than emotion.
Lee sat largely silent through the three-week trial, positioned between a translator and a security guard, hair obscuring her face. Although she technically represented herself, she never addressed the court. Under New Zealand law she now faces a potential life sentence with a minimum non-parole period of at least 10 years. There is also the immediate possibility of compulsory psychiatric detention before any transfer to a corrections facility.
Between culpability and care: the legal and moral faultlines
Insanity defences and what they ask of juries
This case is a reminder of the narrowness of insanity defences in many common-law systems. A confession removes doubt about action; what remains is the defendant’s state of mind — a medical and philosophical inquiry about whether someone could understand right from wrong when they acted. That is difficult terrain: psychiatrists can testify about symptoms and thinking patterns, but the final determination rests on human jurors applying a legal test.
Internationally, mental illness is commonly present in cases of filicide, yet an expert diagnosis does not guarantee legal absolution. Many jurisdictions reserve not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity for a small subset of cases where cognitive impairment is profound. The result is often a two-track outcome: conviction and imprisonment, or compulsory psychiatric care — sometimes a blend of both, as New Zealand law allows.
Context: grief, stigma and immigrant isolation
Broader social patterns that rarely make headlines
Beyond legal doctrine, Lee’s story points to quieter, harder problems. The court heard she had distanced herself from her former life — changing her name and severing ties — before returning to Korea. Those moves hint at isolation, a factor many clinicians say can exacerbate mental illness. For immigrant parents, the challenges of grief, language barriers, social networks that have shrunk or dissolved, and cultural stigma around seeking psychiatric help can combine into a toxic loneliness.
In East Asian cultures, including Korea, mental-health stigma remains powerful, deterring many from seeking timely treatment. That does not excuse criminal acts, but it does suggest where interventions might be effective: community outreach, culturally competent mental-health services and better support systems for bereaved parents.
We should also ask structural questions: how well are social services and primary care systems set up to spot and respond to severe risk in families? Are there pathways for someone teetering on the edge of despair to receive urgent, compassionate help before tragedy ensues?
What the verdict leaves unresolved
When the legal process pivots on what someone “knew” about the moral gravity of their actions, verdicts resolve one kind of question and leave others wide open. The jury has judged Lee criminally responsible. The court must still decide sentencing and whether psychiatric treatment is the right immediate placement. The children’s extended family will have to live with an absence that the law cannot repair.
Beyond the particulars of this case lie broader policy questions that many countries are wrestling with: how to balance accountability with an appropriately medical response to severe mental illness, and how to build community safety nets that recognise cultural contexts. How do we preserve justice for victims and also create systems that prevent the worst harms through early intervention and care?
The suitcases that held Yuna and Minu’s remains are a stark symbol — not only of concealment, but of the hidden suffering that can fester in families. As New Zealand moves toward sentencing in November, the nation — and other societies confronting similar tragedies — should be asking how to better identify and support people in crisis, especially those living between cultures and systems.
The verdict is a legal endpoint in one sense. The questions it raises about mental health, community responsibility and the limits of the justice system are only beginning.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
