Howard Shaw pleads guilty, but his lawyer argues against jail term
Grace Leong 28 June 2012
Howard Shaw, along with two others from a group of 48 men charged with commercial sex with an underage prostitute, pleaded guilty yesterday - and then launched a spirited mitigation plea that ran to 190 pages.
In asking for Shaw to be spared jail, his lawyer Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh of WongPartnership LLP said the case “does not involve the type of predatory conduct or pattern of conscious and deliberate activity aimed at the sexual exploitation of minors”.
“Based on (the girl’s) physical attributes, etc, there are solid grounds for Mr. Shaw, and indeed any reasonable person in his shoes, to have made an honest and reasonable mistake in believing the girl was not a minor,” he said in his opening remarks yesterday.
In addition, there was “deliberate, active and conscious deceit by (the girl) as to her true age”, he argued.
Mr. Singh said the girl - who was just four months shy of 18 at the time of the offence - “connived” with the escort agency to deliberately mislead Mr. Shaw and other men into believing she was of age, and that he was “engaged in perfectly lawful activity when she knew it was not”.
The girl, who is now above 18 years old but has her identity protected by a gag order, received between $450 and $850 a session with each of the 48 men between September 2010 and February 2011.
Section 376B, as currently drafted, is an “absolute liability offence” under Singapore law - which means that even if Shaw’s actions were the result of an “honest and reasonable mistake”, that is no defence.
Parliament, however, has not imposed any mandatory jail or mandatory minimum fine under this section of the Penal Code, and has instead given the courts an extremely wide sentencing discretion ranging from a nominal fine to a maximum jail sentence of seven years, Mr. Singh pointed out.
“Where Parliament has not legislated a mandatory jail sentence for an absolute liability offence, should the Court, in the exercise of its sentencing discretion, impose a jail sentence when the offence was committed unintentionally as a result of an honest and reasonable mistake, and where there are no aggravating factors?” Mr. Singh asked.
He also pointed out that Parliament did not enact any due diligence obligations under this section to check the minor’s identity document.
“For the Court to effectively impose on Section 376B offenders an obligation to check identity documents is to usurp Parliament’s function,” Mr. Singh said.
In deciding on Shaw’s sentence, Mr. Singh also asked the court to “fairly and objectively revisit the correctness” of its approach and decision in the case of former Pei Chun Public School principal Lee Lip Hong.
Lee, who was involved with the same minor, was sentenced to nine weeks’ jail on April 27 but was released after serving a six-week term for good behaviour.
Senior District Judge See Kee Oon, who had presided over Lee’s case, ruled that: “Unless the accused had taken the additional step of verifying her age, subjective perceptions of physical or even intellectual maturity cannot play a part in the sentencing court’s evaluation of culpability in such offences.”
But Mr. Singh disagreed, saying the court “did not approach the matter on the correct legal basis” because it did not consider the minor’s “external appearances, physical attributes and other indicia as to her apparent age”.
And under current laws, Lee wasn’t legally obliged to verify the girl’s age, he argued.
“Lee’s case was decided without the full benefit of the approach taken by judges in many Commonwealth cases. The Court must now decide if it should apply the approach in those cases to Mr. Shaw and others,” Mr. Singh said.
He sought a conditional discharge, or a sentence where Shaw will be spared a jail term as long as he doesn’t commit any offence in Singapore for a period of 12 months.
If that fails, Mr. Singh will ask the court to impose a fine instead of a prison sentence because the offence was committed “unintentionally and unwittingly”.
Shaw, 41, is charged with paying $500 for sexual services with a minor under 18 on Oct 30, 2010 at Hotel 81 Bencoolen. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of seven years in jail or a fine or both.
The case has been adjourned to July 30 before Judge See.
In addition to Shaw, two others - Wilson Oei, a 25-year-old Indonesian and managing director of Global Semi Pte Ltd, and Chiang Meng Chuan, 32, a manager of a manufacturing company - also pleaded guilty yesterday.
Oei faces one charge under Section 376B for paying $450 for sex with the minor on Sept 26, 2010 at Hotel 81 Bencoolen, while Chiang was charged with paying for sex with the minor on Sept 23, 2010 and Sept 29, 2010 at the same hotel. Both men’s bail was extended.
In both cases, the prosecution found that both men came upon the alleged pimp Tang Boon Thiew’s social escort services website in 2010 while they were on another website, the “Sammy Boy Forum”.
In Chiang’s case, prior to having sex with the minor, he had allegedly asked her for her age and the minor allegedly told him she was 18 to 19 years old. But he did not ask for any identification documents to verify this, prosecutors said.
In Oei’s case, he didn’t ask the minor for her age or do anything to verify her age. Lawyers for Oei and Chiang asked the court to adjourn their cases until Shaw’s sentence has been decided.
Lawyer tries to show he did not deliberately hire underage prostitute
By Tham Yuen-C 28 June 2012
Shaw family scion Howard Shaw pleaded guilty yesterday to paying for sex with an underage prostitute, becoming the second man to do so after former principal Lee Lip Hong.
But unlike Mr. Lee, he is contesting the fact that he - and for that matter Mr. Lee - deserve to be jailed.
His lawyer, Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh Nehal, sought to show that Shaw had not deliberately hired an underage prostitute, and had in fact been deceived about her age. That, he said, was enough reason to let Shaw off with just a fine.
Besides citing the facts of the case, Mr. Nehal bolstered his mitigation plea with legal principles.
He argued that the objective of Section 376B of the Penal Code was to penalise sexual predators who deliberately target minors. It would be wrong to punish unwitting offenders with the same stick.
Also, since the law did not stipulate a minimum sentence for the offence, it had not intended for all offenders to end up in jail, he argued. Even Mr. Lee, earlier sentenced to nine weeks’ jail and released on June8, had not deserved the heavy punishment, Mr. Nehal said.
Lawyers had said Mr. Lee’s sentence could set a precedent for the other 47 men who had also had sex with the same girl. But Mr. Nehal said that the court had not approached the sentencing ‘on the correct legal basis’.
Addressing Senior District Judge See Kee Oon, who had also heard Mr. Lee’s case, Mr. Nehal said it was wrong of the judge to disregard evidence pointing to how the girl’s appearance and behaviour could have misled Mr. Lee into believing she was actually 18.
He said the judge had also incorrectly proceeded on the basis that the onus was on Mr. Lee to check her identity documents to verify her age.
Based on the existing legislative framework, he said, offenders had no such obligation.
Given these reasons, the court should not use Lee’s case to set a benchmark, he said.
Shaw, 41, the grandson of Shaw Organisation founder Runme Shaw, had similarly not asked for the girl’s identity documents when he had sex with her on Oct 30, 2010.
Deputy Public Prosecutor S. Sellakumaran yesterday revealed that Shaw had come across the website advertising the girl’s services while surfing the Internet. It had said she was 18.
These facts, said Mr. Nehal, showed that Shaw ‘did not deliberately or consciously target a minor’ when he decided to hire her.
And since the girl was only about 4-1/2 months shy of 18 during her encounter with Shaw, there was also a ‘reasonable basis’ for him to have been mistaken as to her age, he added.
‘It is important for the court to ask how it should calibrate the sentence where the offence is committed as a result of an honest and reasonable mistake as to the age of the minor,’ he said.
He also said that Shaw was ‘asking for nothing more than equal treatment under the law’.
Hinting at the recent controversy over plastic surgeon Woffles Wu’s perceived light sentence for a traffic offence, Mr. Nehal said: ‘This may perhaps be a rather delicate time for someone of my client’s background to be making a mitigation plea, but he is not asking for any special treatment. He is merely asking that the law be applied to him in the same way as it would to any other person.’
During the court session, DPP Sellakumaran also revealed that Shaw had had previous brushes with the law.
In February 1998, he was fined $3,000 and banned from driving for two years for drink-driving. He was convicted of the same offence in January 2006, and got a week’s jail, an $8,000 fine and a four-year driving ban.
Mr. Nehal countered that these prior convictions had nothing to do with his current case.
Shaw was in court with his wife, Ms Jessie Xue, 26, and his sister.
Yesterday, two other men charged with having sex with the same girl also pleaded guilty after Shaw.
But Indonesian Wilson Oei, 25, and Singaporean Chiang Meng Chuan, 32, asked through their respective lawyers Chen Chee Yen and Alan Shankar to be sentenced at a later date, to await the court’s decision on Shaw.
Shaw’s case will be heard again on July 30, and Oei and Chiang’s on Aug 13.
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No obligation to verify girl’s age: Shaw’s lawyer
Howard Shaw pleads guilty, but his lawyer argues against jail term
Grace Leong
28 June 2012
Howard Shaw, along with two others from a group of 48 men charged with commercial sex with an underage prostitute, pleaded guilty yesterday - and then launched a spirited mitigation plea that ran to 190 pages.
In asking for Shaw to be spared jail, his lawyer Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh of WongPartnership LLP said the case “does not involve the type of predatory conduct or pattern of conscious and deliberate activity aimed at the sexual exploitation of minors”.
“Based on (the girl’s) physical attributes, etc, there are solid grounds for Mr. Shaw, and indeed any reasonable person in his shoes, to have made an honest and reasonable mistake in believing the girl was not a minor,” he said in his opening remarks yesterday.
In addition, there was “deliberate, active and conscious deceit by (the girl) as to her true age”, he argued.
Mr. Singh said the girl - who was just four months shy of 18 at the time of the offence - “connived” with the escort agency to deliberately mislead Mr. Shaw and other men into believing she was of age, and that he was “engaged in perfectly lawful activity when she knew it was not”.
The girl, who is now above 18 years old but has her identity protected by a gag order, received between $450 and $850 a session with each of the 48 men between September 2010 and February 2011.
Section 376B, as currently drafted, is an “absolute liability offence” under Singapore law - which means that even if Shaw’s actions were the result of an “honest and reasonable mistake”, that is no defence.
Parliament, however, has not imposed any mandatory jail or mandatory minimum fine under this section of the Penal Code, and has instead given the courts an extremely wide sentencing discretion ranging from a nominal fine to a maximum jail sentence of seven years, Mr. Singh pointed out.
“Where Parliament has not legislated a mandatory jail sentence for an absolute liability offence, should the Court, in the exercise of its sentencing discretion, impose a jail sentence when the offence was committed unintentionally as a result of an honest and reasonable mistake, and where there are no aggravating factors?” Mr. Singh asked.
He also pointed out that Parliament did not enact any due diligence obligations under this section to check the minor’s identity document.
“For the Court to effectively impose on Section 376B offenders an obligation to check identity documents is to usurp Parliament’s function,” Mr. Singh said.
In deciding on Shaw’s sentence, Mr. Singh also asked the court to “fairly and objectively revisit the correctness” of its approach and decision in the case of former Pei Chun Public School principal Lee Lip Hong.
Lee, who was involved with the same minor, was sentenced to nine weeks’ jail on April 27 but was released after serving a six-week term for good behaviour.
Senior District Judge See Kee Oon, who had presided over Lee’s case, ruled that: “Unless the accused had taken the additional step of verifying her age, subjective perceptions of physical or even intellectual maturity cannot play a part in the sentencing court’s evaluation of culpability in such offences.”
But Mr. Singh disagreed, saying the court “did not approach the matter on the correct legal basis” because it did not consider the minor’s “external appearances, physical attributes and other indicia as to her apparent age”.
And under current laws, Lee wasn’t legally obliged to verify the girl’s age, he argued.
“Lee’s case was decided without the full benefit of the approach taken by judges in many Commonwealth cases. The Court must now decide if it should apply the approach in those cases to Mr. Shaw and others,” Mr. Singh said.
He sought a conditional discharge, or a sentence where Shaw will be spared a jail term as long as he doesn’t commit any offence in Singapore for a period of 12 months.
If that fails, Mr. Singh will ask the court to impose a fine instead of a prison sentence because the offence was committed “unintentionally and unwittingly”.
Shaw, 41, is charged with paying $500 for sexual services with a minor under 18 on Oct 30, 2010 at Hotel 81 Bencoolen. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of seven years in jail or a fine or both.
The case has been adjourned to July 30 before Judge See.
In addition to Shaw, two others - Wilson Oei, a 25-year-old Indonesian and managing director of Global Semi Pte Ltd, and Chiang Meng Chuan, 32, a manager of a manufacturing company - also pleaded guilty yesterday.
Oei faces one charge under Section 376B for paying $450 for sex with the minor on Sept 26, 2010 at Hotel 81 Bencoolen, while Chiang was charged with paying for sex with the minor on Sept 23, 2010 and Sept 29, 2010 at the same hotel. Both men’s bail was extended.
In both cases, the prosecution found that both men came upon the alleged pimp Tang Boon Thiew’s social escort services website in 2010 while they were on another website, the “Sammy Boy Forum”.
In Chiang’s case, prior to having sex with the minor, he had allegedly asked her for her age and the minor allegedly told him she was 18 to 19 years old. But he did not ask for any identification documents to verify this, prosecutors said.
In Oei’s case, he didn’t ask the minor for her age or do anything to verify her age. Lawyers for Oei and Chiang asked the court to adjourn their cases until Shaw’s sentence has been decided.
Shaw pleads guilty, seeks to get off with a fine
Lawyer tries to show he did not deliberately hire underage prostitute
By Tham Yuen-C
28 June 2012
Shaw family scion Howard Shaw pleaded guilty yesterday to paying for sex with an underage prostitute, becoming the second man to do so after former principal Lee Lip Hong.
But unlike Mr. Lee, he is contesting the fact that he - and for that matter Mr. Lee - deserve to be jailed.
His lawyer, Senior Counsel Harpreet Singh Nehal, sought to show that Shaw had not deliberately hired an underage prostitute, and had in fact been deceived about her age. That, he said, was enough reason to let Shaw off with just a fine.
Besides citing the facts of the case, Mr. Nehal bolstered his mitigation plea with legal principles.
He argued that the objective of Section 376B of the Penal Code was to penalise sexual predators who deliberately target minors. It would be wrong to punish unwitting offenders with the same stick.
Also, since the law did not stipulate a minimum sentence for the offence, it had not intended for all offenders to end up in jail, he argued. Even Mr. Lee, earlier sentenced to nine weeks’ jail and released on June8, had not deserved the heavy punishment, Mr. Nehal said.
Lawyers had said Mr. Lee’s sentence could set a precedent for the other 47 men who had also had sex with the same girl. But Mr. Nehal said that the court had not approached the sentencing ‘on the correct legal basis’.
Addressing Senior District Judge See Kee Oon, who had also heard Mr. Lee’s case, Mr. Nehal said it was wrong of the judge to disregard evidence pointing to how the girl’s appearance and behaviour could have misled Mr. Lee into believing she was actually 18.
He said the judge had also incorrectly proceeded on the basis that the onus was on Mr. Lee to check her identity documents to verify her age.
Based on the existing legislative framework, he said, offenders had no such obligation.
Given these reasons, the court should not use Lee’s case to set a benchmark, he said.
Shaw, 41, the grandson of Shaw Organisation founder Runme Shaw, had similarly not asked for the girl’s identity documents when he had sex with her on Oct 30, 2010.
Deputy Public Prosecutor S. Sellakumaran yesterday revealed that Shaw had come across the website advertising the girl’s services while surfing the Internet. It had said she was 18.
These facts, said Mr. Nehal, showed that Shaw ‘did not deliberately or consciously target a minor’ when he decided to hire her.
And since the girl was only about 4-1/2 months shy of 18 during her encounter with Shaw, there was also a ‘reasonable basis’ for him to have been mistaken as to her age, he added.
‘It is important for the court to ask how it should calibrate the sentence where the offence is committed as a result of an honest and reasonable mistake as to the age of the minor,’ he said.
He also said that Shaw was ‘asking for nothing more than equal treatment under the law’.
Hinting at the recent controversy over plastic surgeon Woffles Wu’s perceived light sentence for a traffic offence, Mr. Nehal said: ‘This may perhaps be a rather delicate time for someone of my client’s background to be making a mitigation plea, but he is not asking for any special treatment. He is merely asking that the law be applied to him in the same way as it would to any other person.’
During the court session, DPP Sellakumaran also revealed that Shaw had had previous brushes with the law.
In February 1998, he was fined $3,000 and banned from driving for two years for drink-driving. He was convicted of the same offence in January 2006, and got a week’s jail, an $8,000 fine and a four-year driving ban.
Mr. Nehal countered that these prior convictions had nothing to do with his current case.
Shaw was in court with his wife, Ms Jessie Xue, 26, and his sister.
Yesterday, two other men charged with having sex with the same girl also pleaded guilty after Shaw.
But Indonesian Wilson Oei, 25, and Singaporean Chiang Meng Chuan, 32, asked through their respective lawyers Chen Chee Yen and Alan Shankar to be sentenced at a later date, to await the court’s decision on Shaw.
Shaw’s case will be heard again on July 30, and Oei and Chiang’s on Aug 13.
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