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Online posting to incite violence: Appeal for jail term
02 Jul 2012
SOURCE: The Straits Times
THE prosecution yesterday appealed to the High Court to jail a man who had put up an online posting carrying an incitement to violence.
In the first case of its kind, Gary Yue Mun Yew, 36, a former engineer, had been fined $6,000 in March.
He had posted a comment on the Facebook wall of sociopolitical platform Temasek Review on National Day in 2010.
In his posting was a link to a YouTube video depicting the assassination of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat with the comment “We should re-enact a live version of this on our grandstand during our national’s (sic) parade!!!!!!”.
A district judge had found Yue guilty and fined him even though the prosecutors had pressed for a jail term. The judge concluded that Yue’s intention was to seek attention rather than incite violence when he made the posting.
Yesterday, Deputy Public Prosecutor Ng Yiwen argued that the judge had erred and that Yue should be jailed for between six and nine months.
DPP Ng said Yue had intended to incite violence. He pointed to the timing of the post and the similarities between the footage of Egypt’s Victory Parade and Singapore’s National Day Parade, coupled with Yue’s call to re-enact the scenes.
He added that a severe sentence had to be imposed, given that Yue called for violence of the highest order and that he had posted on a public and popular page.
But Yue’s lawyers N. Sreenivasan and S. Balamurugan argued that there was no reason to send him to jail as there were sufficient mitigating factors.
Yue, currently unemployed, was a one-off offender and had shown genuine remorse, said Mr Sreenivasan.
He added that it was unfair to make an example out of Yue just because he was the first to be charged under a provision in the Penal Code that makes it an offence for anyone to make or communicate an electronic record containing an incitement to violence.
The punishment is up to five years’ jail, a fine or both.
After hearing arguments, Justice Quentin Loh reserved judgment. He said that as this was the first prosecution under this section, he would need to reflect on it before he made his decision.
Yue had also been fined $2,500 for posting, on his own Facebook account, a doctored photograph of a Vietnamese police chief executing former deputy prime minister and home affairs minister Wong Kan Seng.
The prosecution has not appealed against the $2,500 fine.
The police investigated Yue after a member of the public made a police report in September 2010. He said during his trial in January that he acted out of stress at work and frustrations he had come across online over the escape of terrorist Mas Selamat Kastari and bread-and-butter issues.
Yue said he was not targeting anyone when he posted the assassination clip; nor did he want anybody to act violently.
