A 27-year-old male nurse was sentenced to 12 weeks of jail term on four charges of insult of modesty as he was caught taking pictures and videos of his female hospital workers while they were changing in the emergency department's staff toilet.
As per the court documents, the man, who used to work as a nurse at an unnamed local hospital took those obscene videos and photos of eight female colleagues in a state of undress over a period of about five months in 2018.
During the hearing, the court came to know that he was inside a cubicle of the unisex toilet and after noticing that the hospital staff members were entering the adjoining cubicle, the accused would put his mobile phone under the cubicle divider to take pictures, for his own pleasure. The unnamed man would stop it after realising that they were male colleagues.
As it happened, on May 11 last year at around 3.45 PM a 24-year-old female victim bumped into him at the entrance of the toilet and went to adjoining cubicles. Later, the man slid his mobile phone underneath the cubicle divider and started to record the female as she was changing out of her scrubs uniform. But, when she bent down to wear her shoes, she noticed the phone and on the same day filed a police complaint.
After the woman found the phone, the man took the device and left the cubicle to go back to his daily work. But he deleted the video after watching it, as he was afraid of getting caught.
Later, police arrested the man and took his phone for further investigation, which revealed that he used the phone to take photos of at least seven other women colleagues in the same toilet. The court documents also revealed that many most of these obscene videos have captured these victims dressed only in their undergarments.
The accused accepted that he took all these pictures as he wanted to see how they will look like without clothes. During the court hearing apart from insulting the modesty charges, another four similar charges were also taken into consideration.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Shenna Tjoa urged for seven weeks of jail term per charge while claiming that this was not a usual upskirt case. But the defence lawyer, Charlene Nah asked for a global sentence of not more than six weeks of imprisonment.
For each charge of insulting the modesty of a woman, the accused could have been jailed up to a year or fined, or both.
