SINGAPORE — On Friday (Feb 7), an expelled Yale-NUS College student was given a sentence of 27 weeks’ jail time for filming his housemates in the shower and taking upskirt photos of women on campus.
The 26-year-old man, whose identity cannot be revealed because of a gag order imposed by the court, committed the offences between August 2017 and March 2019. There were at least four different women who were involved in the incidents.
District Judge Adam Nakhoda said that the majority of the charges were for the shower videos that the perpetrator took. Three charges were for taking upskirt photos of his classmates.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Gabriel Lim had pushed for a 30-week sentence, but Judge Nakhoda ruled on 27 weeks. This was seven weeks longer than the 20 weeks asked for by defence lawyers Josephus Tan and Cory Wong.
For each count of insulting a woman’s modesty, the accused could have been given a maximum year’s jail sentence, a fine, or both.
The judge noted that “the level of intrusion” in the charges of filming others in the shower was high, because the man was able to capture the victims’ faces.
The photos and videos, which would automatically upload to cloud storage, were stored on the student’s laptop.
The judge took note of the fact that the accused admitted that he would rewatch the videos whenever he felt overwhelmed by school work.
Judge Nakhoda added that sentences need to be “sufficiently deterrent” as technology makes it easy these days to save and rewatch videos such as the ones the accused took.
He spoke of an “abuse of trust” , noting that after the student was confronted by one of the women he had filmed, he had deleted the recordings, but copies still remained on his hard drive.
Judge Nakhoda said that the most critical thing was to send a strong message to potential offenders that their actions will be punished, in order to protect the potential victims.
He did note that the accused has shown remorse, cooperated with police, and has made efforts to change his ways; he gave the student time to speak with his family after the hearing.
/TISG