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Caught in a legal trap
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Sun, Dec 09, 2007
The Straits Times
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LA | WYERS exposed touting for briefs are rare. Rarer still would be lawyers getting suspended for paying money under the table to have deals steered to them. A judgment last week by the Court of Three Judges, which found three practitioners in breach, was clear-cut where the law was concerned. Touting was a violation of the professional code. It would degrade ethical standards and, eventually, the standing of a vocation vital to the functioning of a polity. The prohibition should not be removed, precisely because lawyers were saying that the practice of paying referral fees to real estate agents in conveyancing deals is fairly common. One hopes that the Law Society will never advocate reform so far-reaching as to permit fee paying or sharing under specified circumstances.
That's the violation part of the episode. Now for the entrapment part, the process in which the three offending lawyers were caught. Fair-minded people might be equally scandalised that unnamed lawyers had hired an investigator to pose as a property agent to trap their peers. This was about lucre, was it not? The lawyers' actions were recorded and that was that. Evidence so obtained is permitted, the court reminded the defendants. Yet it raises this issue: Is the practice of encouraging or assisting wrongdoing questionable? It offends as much as the act of touting itself. The motivation in many a case is, plainly, billings, not altruism in the desire to preserve ethics. This should matter.
The Law Society is studying the twin issues after Justice V.K. Rajah, who had heard an originating case, asked it to act. He was troubled enough to say that entrapment brought no credit to the profession. The Society will, in all probability, not recommend a change in the law to make such evidence inadmissible. Professional sanctions are different. If it takes the view that entrapment is little different from culpable abetment, it should say so.
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