A man who was initially given probation for various offences, including filming family members of his girlfriend in the shower, making an up-skirt video, and possessing 10,574 obscene films, will be heading to jail after all.
In his ruling on Tuesday (Mar 17), Justice Chan Seng Onn described the initial sentence as “manifestly inadequate” and ordered that Chong Hou En be jailed for 16 weeks.
The prosecution had appealed against Chong’s sentence of 30 months’ split probation.
The 29-year-old had been convicted of five counts of insulting the modesty of a woman by intruding on her privacy. Back in 2011, he was caught red-handed by a victim’s husband, filming an up-skirt video at IMM shopping mall in Jurong. The former labour relations officer had stuck a mini-camera to the tip of his shoe for this purpose.
Following his arrest for that up-skirt video, subsequent investigations uncovered thousands of obscene videos in his computer.
It was also found that Chong installed a camera disguised as a lighter in the toilet of his girlfriend’s parents’ home from August 2010. Thereafter, he filmed her older sister, his girlfriend’s two nieces, aged 10 and 12 at the time, and his girlfriend’s sister-in-law.
Justice Chan noted that in sentencing Chong to probation, the district judge had placed considerable weight on medical evidence that Chong was suffering from the psychiatric condition of voyeurism.
However, in his judgement, Justice Chan took into account aggravating factors such as the high degree of planning and premeditation in Chong’s acts, and the fact that there were multiple victims – two of them very young.
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com
