Although reformative training is aimed as a rehabilitative sentencing option for youth offenders, it should be imposed “cautiously”, given the nature and duration of the punishment, said a district judge.
Reformative training involves an offender between 14 and 21 years old who is institutionalised for at least 18 months and up to 30 months. It results in a criminal record, while a community sentence is rendered spent after it is completed. Probation is deemed not to be a conviction.
While reformative training aims to be rehabilitative, the courts have recognised that it is incarcerative in nature, said District Judge Lim Keng Yeow, in his grounds of decision for rejecting prosecutors’ call for the penalty to be imposed on a teenager who had beaten up foreign workers to practise his martial-arts skills.
“Given the nature and duration of reformative training as it now stands, it should be imposed cautiously, perhaps with as much care as when a physician prescribes very strong medication carrying notable potential side effects,” he wrote. “The courts have absolutely no reason to flinch from imposing reformative training, where it is appropriate. But care ought to be taken not to impose it gratuitously.”
The judge had sentenced Daryl Lim Jun Liang to 10 days of detention and other conditions, ruling that reformative training for the 18-year-old would amount to a “sledgehammer approach”, given the offender’s high capacity for community rehabilitation. Even adults who commit the exact same offence of voluntarily causing hurt would not have been sentenced to a substantial prison term lasting several months, he added.
In his written decision issued last month after the prosecution indicated that it would appeal — which it did yesterday (June 16) — the judge felt community sentencing for Lim was the most fitting option, as probation was insufficiently retributive or deterrent.
A short detention order would mean Lim would still undergo the grim and harsh experience of being locked up, he said. In addition, he was ordered to do 150 hours of community service, report daily to a supervision officer for a year and remain indoors from 10pm to 6am.
The judge said Lim’s probation and community-sentencing suitability reports were positive — he had a supportive family, was able to talk to his mother about past involvement with a gang, and the restaurant he had interned at re-employed him even after knowing about his offence. He demonstrated a capacity for rehabilitation “high enough to outweigh other retributive or deterrent considerations calling for tough sanctions”, DJ Lim said.
Together with three friends, the teen looked for foreign workers who were smaller in build to beat up last September and October, and mocked the victims by dancing in front of them.
The prosecution contended that a deterrent sentence was needed as Lim had targeted a specific class of people, but the judge felt the teen’s offence was not targeted at any particular nationality, race or cultural group, as foreign workers are a large and varied class of individuals.
In his judgment, DJ Lim also made observations about the prosecution’s “unfortunate and undesirable” about-turn in submissions on sentence. It had made no submissions on this at the start, yet objected to probation and pushed for reformative training after the favourable presentencing reports despite having “not more but less reason to press for tougher sanctions”, he said.
The prosecution is allowed to change its mind, but DJ Lim said it could have discharged its duty to the court better in this case, given its “remarkable and yet quite inexplicable” about-turn on sentencing submissions.
Source: www.todayonline.com
