Singapore—A 24-year-old male has been given a jail sentence of 14 weeks due to three charges of criminal trespass as well as charges of insulting the modesty of a woman.
Mr Joyner Tai Liang Yun had been taking video footage of women in various public bathrooms and other venues for at least two years.
His offenses were discovered when investigators from the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) confiscated his laptop in 2017, during the period of his National Service.
The investigators discovered videos taken from two years before. At that time that he filmed women in the public bathrooms, he was still a student.
Mr Tai had enlisted in July of 2016, and by February of the following year, had been assigned as an administrative support assistant at a government building.
On August 8 of that same year (2017), he followed a woman into one of the restrooms in the building where he worked. Taking the stall next to the woman’s, he secretly took pictures of her with his phone.
However, she saw him, and began to yell.
Mr Tai ran from the bathroom and went to his office, where he deleted the photos.
But later, he found himself under investigation, which is when his laptop was confiscated. By November 14, 2017, a staff member from SAF filed a report with the police due to at least two video clips of women undressing in bathrooms and one upskirt video clip.
Mr Tai eventually said that he had taken the upskirt video, which is 19 seconds long, of a random woman at a supermarket on December 12, 2016.
A video of another woman changing clothes in a restroom was taken by Mr Tai in January 2017.
And he also admitted to taking a six-second video clip on July 23, 2015, of a woman in the restroom of the polytechnic where he studied. She was also changing clothes in the video.
At Mr Tai’s court hearing on Monday, September 2, Regina Lim, the Deputy Public Prosecutor, asked for a deterrent jail sentence for Mr Tai.
Earlier, DPP Lim had said,”The accused was curious about what was happening inside the cubicle that the female was in,” and chose to “secretly take a video of her while she was inside the cubicle so that he could watch it later and satisfy his curiosity”
However, the lawyer for Mr Tai, Mr Brown Pereira, requested for the judge to consider putting his client on probation, given that the offenses were committed while Mr Tai was still quite young.
But District Judge Adam Nakhoda did not accede to Mr Brown Pereira’s request, as he said that what Mr Tai did “cannot be attributed to youthful folly” since he had committed most of the offences after his twenty-first birthday.
Mr Tai is set to return to court on October 31 to start serving his 14-week jail sentence. He is currently out on S$15,000 bail. For every single charge of insulting a woman’s modesty, Mr Tai could have been fined and jailed for up to a year./ TISG