Who is Justice Vincent Hoong, the High Court judge who handed Iswaran his sentence?
HIGH PROFILE CASES HE HAS HANDLED
The judge is no stranger to cases that have garnered national attention, and has increased sentences of offenders upon appeal.
In 2023, he raised the five-month jail term of a company director who molested a subordinate to a year. He reversed the District Judge’s decision to acquit the accused on three charges, after the prosecution had appeal against the acquittals.
One of the most recent high-profile cases he was involved in include that of Vang Shuiming, one of the offenders in the massive billion-dollar money laundering case that concluded earlier this year.
Justice Hoong rejected Vang’s application to the High Court to revoke a lower court’s decision in denying him bail, noting among other factors that Vang was a flight risk.
Justice Hoong was also the sentencing judge in the case of Xavier Yap, who killed his autistic twin sons in 2022.
He said then that violence inflicted by parents on their children would be met with the full force of the law, rejecting the defence’s call for concurrent jail terms as it would be “morally unjust”.
In the case of a man who fractured the skulls of his baby daughter and toddler son, Justice Hoong was part of a three-judge court that dismissed an appeal for a shorter jail term, saying the sentence was “lenient”. The judges said that the accused should have received about five years more jail instead.
After reviewing this case, Justice Hoong, along with the two other judges, developed a new sentencing framework for the offence of voluntarily causing grievous hurt against a person aged below 14.
