When he showed up at the designated place on 1 April 2006, his internet contact revealed himself to be a police officer. Yeo was then arrested for drug possession. On 7 June 2006, he was sentenced to 8 months' in jail [1].

Two concerns bifurcate from here. The first, which this essay addresses, is that of entrapment and the quality of justice. The second, which is the subject of Yet another exploitative story, is about how the tabloid New Paper handled the story.

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Yeo's lawyer, Kertar Singh, argued before the court that the police "overstepped a boundary". Yeo was at first unwilling to participate and it took considerable and persistent inducement before he changed his mind.

The court's attention was drawn to a judgment in October 2001, in the UK House of Lords that dealt with this issue. The case involved Spencer Grant Looseley, who was approached several times by an undercover police officer trying to get him to sell drugs. Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead, in the opening paragraph of his judgment [2], said,

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... 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.

Much of the judicial discussion centred on whether entrapment was a valid argument for mitigation, i.e. reducing the severity of the sentence, or for defence, denying culpability.

My reading of that lengthy judgment was that the Law Lords considered that in certain circumstances, entrapment could be a valid defence. The simple tests were:

• Whether the authorities had reasonable grounds to suspect that the person was ordinarily engaged in such offences, before launching the entrapment exercise;
   
• Whether, prior to the inducement, the accused had the ready intention of committing the offence as soon as an opportunity arose;
   
• Whether the offence was induced as the result of persistent requests, threats, deceit, or offers of rewards.

Providing a simple opportunity to people to commit a crime, if they are of a mind to do so is one thing, but putting forth reward and inducement to convince them to do it, is another.

For example, say we have a rampant situation of taxis refusing to turn on their meters, and it is a crime in law. Say the police use decoys who board taxis asking to travel to out-of-the-way destinations. If a taxi-driver, on learning the destination, responds to the decoy passenger with the counter-offer of an off-meter fare, then this may be acceptable entrapment. The decoy's role was passive, not making any inducement; the taxi-driver volunteered the crime.

But in another case that the Law Lords considered, a man who ordinarily trafficked in cigarettes was approached by police decoys, at first, only for cigarettes. After a number of transactions, a trusting relationship developed between them. Then the decoys asked him if he could supply heroin as well. Not wanting to lose a regular customer, the cigarette guy went out of his way to find suppliers of heroin in order to complete the transaction, even though his first reaction was "I'm not into heroin."

The Law Lords felt this amounted to excessive inducement. The decoys actively suggested and promoted the crime.

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	-- The New Paper, 11 June 2006, Family did not know he's gay or that he took drugs

In the absence of court transcripts, it is hard to say how much inducement was offered by the police officers to Adrian Yeo, though that there was some measure of inducement is quite clear. That inducement was sex.

It is troubling that according to a friend of Yeo's, he went around a number of drug dealers in a "desperate" attempt to obtain the drugs that would gain him admission into the sex session, though of course the friend could be exaggerating.

The court did not accept the defence of undue entrapment, sentencing Yeo to 8 months' imprisonment. More crucially, quoting from the report in the Straits Times, 8 June 2006, the "the judge said there was nothing to suggest that [Central Narcotics Bureau] officers had acted illegally or had gone beyond the boundary of the law."

I note that the court came to this conclusion at the same sitting as the trial rather than reserve judgment. Surely the issue of entrapment raised by defence counsel must have seemed serious enough to warrant careful consideration and study before coming to a decision?

In any case, the issue with entrapment is not whether the actions of the police violated any specific law, as the judge's words imply, but whether they violated considerations of justice. I'm not arguing that in this particular case it did, but I would think that this important question was treated too lightly.

This brings me to my main question: Do Singapore courts merely see their role as enforcing laws or delivering justice?

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