Man who sexually abused daughter: High Court throws out new evidence on ‘deformed’ penis

SINGAPORE — A High Court judge has rejected new evidence from a witness who testified that a 43-year-old man found guilty of sexually abusing his young daughter had a “deformed” penis.

Issuing his findings on Monday (Jan 21), Justice Aedit Abdullah ruled that the two men had colluded to introduce false evidence in court, thereby committing abuse of process.

In 2017, Justice Aedit had convicted the father of sexually abusing his daughter between 2011 and 2014, sentencing him to 23 years and six months’ jail and the maximum 24 strokes of the cane. The victim — the oldest of three children — was 11 years old when the abuse began.

The trial lasted nearly three years and the father’s defence was that it was physically impossible for him to sexually penetrate his daughter, following a botched penis enlargement procedure in 2009. His wife and daughter, however, testified that it looked normal even in April 2014.

The man and his family cannot be named in order to protect the girl’s identity.

To fight his conviction and sentence, the man found two witnesses to corroborate his claim that he has a misshapen penis.

The Court of Appeal sent the case back to the High Court, where Justice Aedit ruled on the new evidence before the appeal could resume.

While the prosecution asked the High Court to increase the man’s sentence by one-and-a-half years to reflect abuse of process, the judge said he would leave it to the apex court to decide.

DRAWING WAS SUSPICIOUSLY CLOSE TO PHOTO

During the first day of proceedings last year, the father told the court that his first witness had decided not to testify.

Feeling “depressed and confused”, he said he then met a second witness by chance along Bussorah Street.

The second witness — Mr Muhammad Ridzwan Idris, his former football buddy — testified that they worked together at a snack stall during an event at the Singapore Expo in 2013.

Mr Ridzwan said he happened to see the man’s penis while they were at the urinals in the bathroom, and also produced a drawing of it. It was “round like a doorknob” and “didn’t look normal”.

However, Justice Aedit ruled that it was “highly unlikely” that Mr Ridzwan could see the man’s penis in the manner he described.

“It may be expected from a short glance for the witness to have seen a deformed penis, but not in the precise and accurate way that the witness recollected. That would have required close observation, which the witness did not say that he was able to do so,” he added.

Mr Ridzwan’s drawing of the penis was also “suspiciously close” to the photograph of it tendered in the main trial. The drawing also appeared to be a top-down view, whereas Mr Ridzwan could only have seen the man’s penis from a side angle from the next urinal.

“While there was no evidence about how the witness came to be able to refer to the photograph in question, the similarity and the circumstances above raise the inevitable inference that he copied the photograph,” the judge said.

Meanwhile, the circumstances of how the man came to meet Mr Ridzwan “trigger concerns about the truth of what was recounted, as well as the credibility of the accused and the witness”, Justice Aedit said.

Some circumstances also raised doubts about the accuracy of the evidence. This included the man not asking Mr Ridzwan what he saw, and informing his lawyer of the new witness only four days later.

These were important matters related to the pending appeal, and there should have been at least some discussion and confirmation about what Mr Ridzwan saw of the man’s penis, Justice Aedit said.

In addition, the man’s and Mr Ridzwan’s accounts of their meeting with the man’s lawyer, Mr Ramesh Tiwary, “differ significantly”.

“This discrepancy is wholly surprising on a matter of such importance,” said the judge.

Mr Ridzwan misled the court about the nature and extent of both men’s friendship, Justice Aedit said. The witness had tried to downplay their friendship by lying that he never went to Malaysia with the man, in order to “protect the parties from allegations of collusion”.

In 2013, the two men travelled thrice to Malaysia together. Records also showed that they went there within minutes of each other in 2011, contradicting Mr Ridzwan’s testimony that they only knew each other from 2012.

CONTRIVED AND FALSE

Finding Mr Ridzwan’s evidence to be “contrived and false”, Justice Aedit said that meant the father was at least aware of the manufacturing of evidence.

“The fact that the accused came to know, just over a short period of a couple of weeks, of two witnesses who saw his penis in similar circumstances, just at or near the time of the hearing of his appeal and application for further evidence, raises serious concerns about the veracity of his evidence and that of the witness, and indeed (the first witness), had he come forward,” the judge pointed out.

While the father had argued that coincidences happen, Justice Aedit said that when they take place in suspicious circumstances, “the only conclusion that can be drawn is that matters are contrived and not innocent happenstance”.