Yu Eng Chin v Public Prosecutor

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Judge: Choo Han Teck J
• Judgment Date: 09 March 2009
• Neutral Citation: [2009] SGHC 57
• Court: High Court (Singapore)
• Published date: 11 March 2009
• Citation: [2009] SGHC 57
• Plaintiff Counsel: Vijay Kumar Rai (Arbiters' Inc Law Corporation)
• Defendant Counsel: Lee Jwee Nguan (Deputy Public Prosecutor)
• Subject Matter: Criminal Law
• Year: 2009

9 March 2009 Judgment reserved

Choo Han Teck J:

1 The appellant is 52 years old. He helped his wife run a school canteen. They have two grown up children, a son aged 22 and a daughter aged 20. He was tried and convicted on three charges of molesting the complainant, one Malik Sudarwati, his domestic maid who started work with the appellant in September 2005. The offences were committed between December 2008 and February 2009. In the first two charges, he was alleged to have fondled the maid’s breast and kissed her on the lips. It was alleged in the third charge that he squeezed her breasts and inserted a finger into her vagina. He was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment on the first and second charges, and 18 months imprisonment on the third charge. The trial judge also ordered the imprisonment terms of the first and second charges to be concurrent and the third charge to run consecutively after the first two terms, making a total of 30 months imprisonment in total. The appellant appealed against the convictions as well as the respective sentences imposed.

2 Mr VK Rai, counsel for the appellant, submitted that the appellant was wrongly convicted because the trial judge’s evaluation of the evidence was flawed. Counsel submitted that the trial judge disregarded material evidence and wrongly took into account irrelevant ones. There were unusual facts in this case that a judge hearing the trial could not help but note. First, the complainant had also made a police report against her subsequent employer’s brother for molesting her. She was employed by that employer after her employment with the appellant was terminated. Secondly, Prity Sriwanti, the next maid employed by the appellant, also made a police complaint against him. She too alleged that the appellant had molested her. In respect of the first, Mr Rai submitted that it was not coincidence that the complainant lodged a complaint against two employers in succession. He also submitted that the complainant was goaded by the police to make the complaint when they were investigating a complainant by the other maid, Prity Sriwanti. The two unusual facts - the maid who complained against two successive employers, and the employer who was accused by two successive maids - stood out so starkly that no emphasis was required. The question was how should the trial judge proceed to make her findings? This appeal was mainly on questions of fact, and so the learned DPP urged me not to disturb the findings made in the court below. It seemed that whenever one party takes this position, the other will invariably remind the court that in clear instances and “in the interests of justice” the appellate court should overturn the findings of fact. Both propositions are sound in law and have been uttered time without number in the highest courts throughout the common law world. Which is the applicable proposition in any given case? That depends on the facts.

3 In a case like this, without any witness to the actual assault, the verdict will depend largely on the credibility of the complainant as well as the person accused. With one exception, the issues raised in this appeal were issues of fact. The trial judge described the process in which she went about considering the evidence and the witnesses in order to decide whether the prosecution had proved its case. The exercise was a little bit more complicated than that because even if the judge believed the complainant, she was still obliged to find out whether there was any evidence that might make it unsafe to convict the appellant. The trial judge therefore described all the opposing accounts of what happened. She assessed and formed an opinion as to the evidence and the credibility of each of the witnesses. She was mindful of the witnesses who were not called, namely, the appellant’s son who was in the police force, and Prity Sriwanti. She decided to treat the absence of these witnesses as a neutral factor although she thought that it would be “much easier” for the defence to call the appellant’s son. I understood the phrase “much easier” in the context of the judgment to mean that the son was a more useful witness to the defence than he would be to the prosecution, and that by reason of his relationship with the appellant, he should have more likely been called by the defence than the prosecution. Neither did the trial judge draw any damaging inference against the appellant in the absence of Prity Sriwanti’s evidence. The appellant’s admissions in his statements to the police were taken into account crucially in the assessment of the appellant’s credibility. He denied under cross-examination that he had...