Youth who performed lewd act on cat given probation, must attend intervention
As part of his sentence, the offender, who is now 20, must remain indoors from 10pm to 6am every day and perform 70 hours of community service.
His mother was bonded for $5,000 to ensure his good behaviour during the probation period.
He must also attend offence-specific intervention to address his sexually offending behaviour.
Unrelated to this case, he also committed other offences, including theft, in 2022 when he was 17 years old.
In consequence, he cannot be named as those below 18 are protected under the Children and Young Persons Act.
In May, the offender pleaded guilty to one count each of assault, harassment and doing an obscene act in a public place.
Two counts of theft and a second assault charge were considered during his sentencing.
In earlier proceedings, Deputy Public Prosecutor Dillon Kok told the court that a 35-year-old man, who lived in a Senja Road block of flats, owned the cat, which he allowed to roam freely outside his home.
The then 18-year-old offender, who lived in the same block, saw the cat in a public place at around 1.50am on April 8, 2023, and decided to play with it.
Somehow, the animal made him feel sexually aroused, and he performed an obscene act on it before it moved away.
A nearby CCTV camera recorded the incident and a neighbour showed the cat owner the footage soon after.
Feeling annoyed, the owner uploaded the clip onto his social media account as he wanted to identify the offender. He also took the cat to a veterinarian, who found that it was not injured.
On April 11, 2023, a member of the public alerted the police to the incident, and officers arrested the offender later that day.
Separately, the offender had also harassed and assaulted a 19-year-old coursemate who has mild intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder.
The offender did not like the victim and would constantly bully him - both physically and in cyberspace.
Court documents stated that the offender openly picked on the victim. His acts included tripping him in class and hitting him.
The victim did not dare to stand up to his bully or inform others about his ordeal as he feared for his own safety.
On March 31, 2022, the offender exchanged text messages with the victim and repeatedly sent the latter expletive-laden insults.
The pair were in class in November that year when the offender saw the victim resting his head against another coursemate's bag.
The offender became irritated, followed the victim to a toilet and slapped his face.
In 2023, the victim's father chanced upon the text messages from the previous year and made a police report. The offender was charged in court in 2024.
The youth's case was the second reported one this week involving cats.
In an unrelated case on July 9, Barrie Lin Pengli, 33, who was initially handed a 14-month jail term for abusing cats and killing two of them by throwing them off high floors at Housing Board blocks, had his sentence nearly doubled to 27 months by the High Court.
This came after the prosecution appealed against the initial sentence which a district judge had imposed in February.
In allowing the appeal, Justice Vincent Hoong said Lin's acts of inflicting violence on animals for his perverse pleasure were among the most heinous cases of animal cruelty to come before the courts.
He added that given the continued prevalence of animal cruelty and welfare cases, the courts must give greater weight to deterrence in sentencing.
In 2014, Parliament strengthened the legislation by increasing the maximum sentence from a $10,000 fine and a year's jail to a $15,000 fine and 18 months' jail.
However, the number of animal cruelty and welfare cases has remained high over the years, Justice Hoong noted.
From 2019 to 2023, the National Parks Board investigated an annual average of about 1,200 alleged animal cruelty and welfare cases.
Justice Hoong stressed that animals constitute a vulnerable class of victims, adding: "Animal cruelty has no place in a just and humane society and will be met with the full force of the law."
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