Android java.lang.VerifyError only on 1.5

Question

I have the following code which gets call in my main activity's onCreate method

 public static ErrorReporter getInstance(){
  if (instance == null){
   instance = new ErrorReporter();
  }
  return instance;
 }

Only on android 1.5 calling the above method causes java.lang.VerifyError. I am not able to figure out why this is happening. Any hints on how to solve this problem