- 4 wife and child or a job being available to him, but can rely just as strongly on his youth and a university place being available to him. 7. Even where a community service order would be appropriate to the circumstance of the offender, there remains the question of whether such an order would be appropriate to the circumstances of the offence. It may be, as Mayo VP pointed out in Wong Yiu Kuen at pp. 491I – 492A, that “while the offender may have been an appropriate candidate for community service, the offence was, on its facts, too serious for this option to have been utilised”. For example, as Mayo VP immediately went on to point out at p. 492B, “it is only in the most exceptional cases that anything other than an immediate custodial sentence is appropriate in cases involving an element of corruption”. 8. The same thing has been said about offences contrary to the provision against which this Appellant has offended, namely s. 161 of the Crimes Ordinance. In HKSAR v Tam Hei Lun [2000] 3 HKC 745 Rogers VP, delivering the judgment of the Court of Appeal, said at p. 750A that “unless there are most unusual circumstances a non-custodial sentence would be inappropriate for offences against s. 161”. There the Court of Appeal upheld a detention centre order against a young man of previous good character who came from a stable home background, had a good work and study record, had shown genuine remorse, was unlikely to re-offend, and was undertaking in his spare time a course of study which any custodial sentence was likely to disrupt. Even in those circumstances, the Court of Appeal refused to substitute a community service order for the detention centre order imposed by the sentencing judge. In refusing to do that, the Court of Appeal was acting on its view of the seriousness of s. 161 offences.