This doesn't make any sense, because the government has openly declared that Section 377A will not be enforced in situations of consensual sex between adults. Why would the police threaten the men with 377A?

The most likely reason, according to a lawyer friend of mine, is that it is intended to pressurise them to plead guilty to the drug charges: Do that, and we'll withdraw the 377A charge.

This is a pretty routine tactic, he said.

Doesn't this create a bias against gay men? If a mixed group of five men and women were caught in the love hotel with drugs, they would not be under pressure to confess under threat of 377A. Is this fair?

I'm not sure that prosecutors even ask themselves this question. The chief motivation may be efficiency: How to dispose of a case as quickly as possible and not waste their time and the court's time. Wouldn't a confession be the most efficient way to get things done? So, if a confession can be obtained by opening with a 377A charge, and then negotiating a reduction, why not?

Gay men alone would be put under this kind of pressure. If the arrested persons didn't know that the government had promised not to use this law -– and since under Singapore law, they are not allowed to have a lawyer with them when being interrogated in the police station, so they wouldn't have a lawyer to tell them about the government's promise -– they might be induced to admit to something just to get out of the nightmare.

* * * * *

 
Apparently the same negotiating tactic is visible in another recent case, though not one involving drugs. This other case involved an underaged boy. I have written about it, in Six men charged for sex with boy aged 15. (I actually do know more about this case than what I have written, but since it is a pending case, I shall be tight-lipped about it for now.)

Anyway, in that article, I questioned why three of the six men who are alleged to have had sexual relations of a "masturbatory nature" with a 15 year-old boy were charged under Section 377A when Section 7 of the Children and Young Persons Act (CYPA) could be used. I mentioned my friend George Hwang's postulation that the police might be deliberately trying to keep the law alive through use. My own view was that it was just sloppiness borne out of bureaucratic habit.

 
Apart from the question of bias -- i.e. gay men face more pressure to confess because 377A can be wielded over them -- another concern centres around this very problem of inducement. The second paragraph of Section 122 (5) of the Criminal procedure Code says that statements made under such conditions are inadmissible.

... the court shall refuse to admit such statement or allow it to be used as aforesaid if the making of the statement appears to the court to have been caused by any inducement, threat or promise having reference to the charge against such person, proceeding from a person in authority and sufficient, in the opinion of the court, to give such person grounds which would appear to him reasonable...

Is the suggestion that charges would be reduced if they pleaded guilty a form of inducement?

I am sure this question is an old one, exhaustively debated by lawyers and law students. It is almost surely a settled question too, since plea bargaining is a tool of the trade in many jurisdictions. If anyone knows the principles governing how the law sees this kind of thing, please write in.

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