Singaporean woman acquitted of sexual assault, prosecution to appeal
Tuesday April 19, 2016
08:09 AM GMT+8
SINGAPORE, April 19 — The prosecution will be appealing the decision of a High Court judge who ruled that women cannot be charged with the offence of sexual penetration of minors — a decision that resulted in a woman being acquitted of six charges brought against her.
In a media statement issued yesterday, the Attorney-General’s Chambers (AGC) said the ruling on the statute in question — Section 376A(1)(b) of the Penal Code — is a matter of “public interestâ€.
The case in question involved Zunika Ahmad, 40, who was charged with 20 counts of sexually penetrating a teenage girl with a dildo on several occasions in a span of more than 20 months.
Zunika, who was born a woman but has identified as a man since her teens, had pleaded guilty to six of these charges, with the remaining counts to be taken into consideration for sentencing.
But her guilty plea to these charges were rejected by Senior Judge Kan Ting Chiu, who found that the choice of words for the statute would reasonably indicate that it was intended to apply only to male offenders.
“The reference to a person who has a penis cannot be construed to include a woman without doing violence to common sense and anatomy,†the judge had said.
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