Dumb letters, Pt2
June 17, 2006
Entrapment necessary for law enforcement
THE report, ‘Entrapment: Lawyers say narcotics officers crossed the line in quest to nab offender, but any method of entrapment is legal here’ (ST, June 9), suggested that the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) had acted unethically in the apprehension of Adrian Yeo for drug possession.
This led to various letters from concerned members of the public on the entrapment issue.
The Straits Times followed up on the subject with an editorial, ‘Entrapment: Fair or not?’ (June 14), advocating that CNB’s action against Yeo was somehow wrong because ‘fair-minded people are entitled to point out it seems neither fair nor ethical to encourage a person to break the law, just for enforcement agencies to gather evidence’.
The ST article published on June 9 regrettably did not report all the facts of Yeo’s case. A diligent reading of Yeo’s mitigation plea which was presented in court will show that he had been consuming drugs even before he came to the attention of CNB.
In fact, he would not have been of any interest to CNB otherwise; it was his drug abuse which led CNB to investigate him in the first place.
When Yeo was asked if he had any drugs, he volunteered to take drugs to the hotel where he was subsequently arrested with Ecstasy, ‘Ice’ and Ketamine.
Yeo was, therefore, not a law-abiding person enticed into committing an offence by CNB.
In omitting to highlight the fact that he was a habitual drug abuser, the ST report has misled readers into thinking that CNB had acted unethically when the circumstances of the case clearly showed the contrary and that CNB had acted professionally.
>> If he is a habitual drug user, why has he not been caught until now?
The ST editorial suggests that law-enforcement methods like entrapment should be reserved for only more serious offences involving drug trafficking and ‘national security’, rather than drug abuse. This demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the situation.
Drug abuse is a serious threat. The battle against drugs in Singapore faces a new challenge - even as we succeeded in addressing the serious heroin problem of the past, today we face a growing potential problem of synthetic-drug abuse.
>> The same can be said for ANY offence. It is most disturbing, is it not that public money and effort is spent not in solving crimes but in entrapment?
A majority of those arrested for synthetic-drug abuse are first-time offenders. One of the concerns this trend raises is the mentality of certain segments of our society who think that synthetic drugs are ’soft’ drugs which should be tolerated as they are acceptable as part of a modern ‘cool’ lifestyle. This is a dangerous attitude which we must not allow to take root in our society.
The ST editorial also suggested that because Yeo is a taxi-driver’s son who made it as a doctor, but whose future is now uncertain, the action taken against him will ‘reinforce in some people a sense that natural justice had been violated’.
This is a strange argument. Surely, the ST is not suggesting that the CNB action would be fairer and more just if Yeo had been related to a person of high social standing?
>> This point i agree with. The ST needlessly sensationalised the fact that he was a doctor.
This cannot be the way our criminal-justice system should work. Indeed, if the application of our criminal laws and the actions of our law-enforcement agencies were to be dictated by factors such as an offender’s family connections, income and social status, it would be highly unjust and perverse, and no Singaporean will stand for it.
Finally, the ST editorial concluded by referring to the ‘entrapment’ case of insurance agent Teo Ya Ling as another illustration of unethical action by the authorities. This is wrong and without basis.
Teo was not an innocent law-abiding party tempted by CNB officers into committing an offence. She was a small-time drug dealer who had all along been supplying drugs to her clients in return for their buying insurance policies from her.
>> Now this is most curious. IF she was a “small-time drug dealer”, then why is there a need to use entrapment? Can’t the police capture her by the normal, legit way? Or has entrapment become an easy way out for the police?
While a time-honoured tenet of natural justice is audi alteram partem - ‘to hear the other side’ - the ST reporter chose not to obtain and verify the facts of the case with any of the relevant enforcement agencies, other than to ask whether CNB polices chatlines and the Internet.
At no point did the reporter seek the views of any relevant enforcement agency on the issue of entrapment.
If the reporter and the person who wrote the editorial had done their research, your paper would have been able to present a more balanced perspective.
Ong-Chew Peck Wan (Mrs)
Director
Corporate Communications
Division for Permanent Secretary (Home Affairs)
>> I Think That the writer should be sentenced to watch Minority Report 10,000 times.
A more eloquent argument by Nicholls LJ, in Regina v Loosely [2001] UKHL 53:
1. Every court has an inherent power and duty to prevent abuse of its process. This is a fundamental principle of the rule of law. By recourse to this principle courts ensure that executive agents of the state do not misuse the coercive, law enforcement functions of the courts and thereby oppress citizens of the state. Entrapment, with which these two appeals are concerned, is an instance where such misuse may occur. It is simply not acceptable that the state through its agents should lure its citizens into committing acts forbidden by the law and then seek to prosecute them for doing so. That would be entrapment. That would be a misuse of state power, and an abuse of the process of the courts. The unattractive consequences, frightening and sinister in extreme cases, which state conduct of this nature could have are obvious. The role of the courts is to stand between the state and its citizens and make sure this does not happen.
RE-DRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF ENTRAPMENT by Andrew Ashworth. (Crim. L.R. 2002):
The whole notion of protection implies that citizens have a right not to be subjected to certain forms of conduct by state officials–what Lord Nicholls referred to as “state-created crime”. Ordinary life is full of temptations, some of them temptations to commit crime, and the principle seems to be that citizens should not be at risk of being subjected to deliberate and excessive temptation by officials. As the High Court of Australia put it, the principle is “that a citizen’s precious right to immunity from arbitrary and unlawful intrusion into the daily affairs of private life may remain unimpaired.” [FN19] There must be limits to the extent to which officials may use deception to place temptations in front of citizens. We consider below (parts 3 and 4) what sorts of official conduct cross the boundary; for the present, the point is that the rationale of protection or prevention implies that citizens ought to be protected from, or at least protected from the consequences of, excessive temptation, “luring”, “enticement”, etc., by law enforcement officers.
