The Court of Appeal in Lee Chez Kee (C.A.) handed down a judgment with respect to the law on common intention and hearsay in criminal cases which has already attracted two case notes. This note adds to them by focusing on a particularly thorny issue before the Court, which is the relationship between the two statutory regimes providing for the admissibility of hearsay statements: the Criminal Procedure Code and the Evidence Act, especially section 30. The case is unusual in that the Court rendered dissonant judgments with different outcomes. Choo Han Teck J. concurred with V.K. Rajah J.A.'s analysis that the confessional statements were not admissible, and thought that there was a need for a retrial, given the prejudicial nature of the evidence wrongly admitted. Rajah J.A.'s view was that there was no need for a re-trial as the other evidence was sufficient to establish the guilt of the accused.

Justice demands that a person who is being attacked, or who perceives that he is about to be attacked, should have the right to defend himself. For this reason, both civil and criminal law provide that if a person injures or kills another person while defending himself against an actual or anticipated attack he may, in certain circumstances, escape liability for his act. Unfortunately, though - particularly in civil law - the precise parameters of self-defence have always been somewhat woolly. Although all courts deciding cases in which self-defence has been at issue have agreed on the key requirement that the force used by the defendant must be proportionate to the actual or perceived threat, there has been little examination of the scope of the defence. Recently, however, the House of Lords had the opportunity to review and clarify the nature of self-defence in the high-profile case of Ashley, a tort action which arose from the killing of an unarmed suspect by a police officer who mistakenly believed that the suspect posed an imminent threat. The decision in Ashley - that in civil law, self-defence requires the defendant's belief that he is under serious threat to be both honest and reasonable - is of significance throughout the common law world for the many interesting observations it contains on the differences between civil and criminal law. It is, moreover, of particular interest in Singapore, in light of changes to the Penal Code and proposed changes to the Criminal Procedure Code to limit the criminal liability of police officers who kill or injure suspects during anti-terrorist operations.

The former section 375 of the Singaporean Penal Code contained an exception which stated that "sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife ...is not rape". This has been commonly interpreted to mean that it was not possible to convict a husband of the offence of rape on his wife under any circumstances so long as they remain legally married. The only qualification to the blanket immunity for husbands is that the wife must not be under 13 years of age. For example, one commentator wrote: In Singapore ... under no circumstances would a husband be guilty of the rape of his wife so long as she is not under thirteen years of age. The only possible exception might be where the court has granted a decree nisi of divorce although even this is doubtful.

Because so much academic ink has been spilt on the doctrine of consideration over so very many decades (with no concrete action being taken) and because there is ...such a dearth of cases on the doctrine itself, it would appear that any proposed reform of the doctrine is much ado about nothing ...However, because the doctrine of consideration does contain certain basic weaknesses which have been pointed out, in extenso, in the relevant legal literature, it almost certainly needs to be reformed. The basic difficulties and alternatives have been set out briefly above but will need to be considered in much greater detail when the issue next comes squarely before this court.

In Imbree v. McNeilly, the High Court of Australia ruled that a learner driver is no longer to be held to the standard of a reasonable but unqualified (and inexperienced) driver in negligence claims. This overrules Cook v. Cook in this aspect and necessitates changes in tort textbooks which have very often cited Cook in direct contrast with the English position as embodied in Nettleship v. Weston. The contrast, which the textbooks have traditionally drawn, is used to illustrate the principle that the objective standard of care required by the law is one that relates to the type of activity in which the defendant is engaged, rather than the category of actor to which the defendant belongs. Thus, whereas the English Court of Appeal in Nettleship regarded that driving a motor vehicle requires the driver to be adjudged by the standard of a competent driver, the High Court of Australia in Cook was prepared to look to the individual characteristics of the defendant as evincing a "special relationship" with the plaintiff, to which effect was given by lowering the standard of care. This distinction has now been erased in Imbree, which concerned a claim by a passenger against an inexperienced driver of his car for injuries suffered. Imbree is certainly an important decision whose significance will surely find resonance in varied areas of tort law in time to come. It is the modest aim of this case note to show that Imbree, while a decision on a narrow point, in fact hints at a larger difficulty in the ascertainment of the standard of care in individual cases. It is in this context that it will be suggested that, when the time comes for Singapore.