AAP
14 Mar, 2024 03:46 AM2 mins to read
A woman faces a jail stint after being found guilty of the manslaughter of an unlicensed beauty clinic’s operator who underwent a botched breast augmentation procedure.
The NSW District Court jury quickly delivered its verdict this morning after beginning deliberations yesterday afternoon, more than six years after the September 2017 death.
A teary-eyed Jie Shao entered the dock as her bail was revoked after the jury of five women and seven men handed down the guilty verdict.
A term of full-time imprisonment was “realistically inevitable”, Judge Timothy Gartelmann said.
Shao will watch via video from custody during a sentencing hearing in May.
Her trial began in February, poring over what she did – and did not do – before and after 35-year-old Jean Huang lost consciousness at the Medi Beauty Clinic she operated at Chippendale, in inner-city Sydney.
Huang died in hospital after the procedure, which was not approved in Australia at the time and involved hyaluronic acid being injected into her breasts as filler.
Shao’s lawyers acknowledged Huang was mistakenly given too much of the local anaesthetic lidocaine but argued the jury would not be satisfied her actions were so dangerous or fell so far below reasonable standards of care that they should warrant criminal punishment.
They sought to convince jurors key prosecution witnesses had a financial motive to lie and had used Shao as a convenient patsy.
Shao’s defence argued she had performed the procedure when Huang asked her to do it rather than a man at the clinic, who left Australia after her death and has never returned.
The jury heard Shao had been in Sydney for 24 hours before performing the procedure and had held herself out as a doctor in messages exchanged with Huang.
Shao was not registered as a medical practitioner in Australia or China, where she studied and interned at hospitals.
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