Offenders who get sentence reduced can't use served jail time to satisfy fine: Court

An offender who chooses to serve his jail sentence despite appealing against it cannot use the served time to satisfy the punishment should he subsequently get his jail term reduced to a fine.

- Samuel Devaraj

This ruling by the Court of Appeal on Oct 29 arose from a series of events in a defamation case against Mr Terry Xu, chief editor of The Online Citizen, who was convicted of defaming Cabinet members.

He was sentenced to three weeks' jail by a district court in April 2022 and chose to serve the sentence despite appealing against it, as he had relocated to Taiwan and wanted to serve and get his sentence over with.

His appeal on the sentence was successful, and in May 2023, he was given an $8,000 fine. However, he did not want to pay the fine, which carried a two-week default jail term in lieu of payment.

His lawyers argued then that given the time he had already served, he should be deemed to have served the default term.

The prosecution argued that, under the law, he had to serve the two-week default term.

The judge ruled then that the previously served jail term should be treated as going towards the default sentence, and thus nothing remained to be served or paid.