The Best I Could

by Subhas Anandan

  In fact, my clients show their gratitude to me in many ways after their cases are concluded. The chief executive officer of a listed company whom I defended with some degree of success takes me out for drives in his fancy cars. Others just hug me and thank me at the end of the case. Once, when I got a client’s death sentence squashed, his family came to me and said that I was a god to them. They knelt in front of me and touched my feet. The victim’s family, on the other hand, cursed and swore at me, but that is to be expected. By the same token, I’ve received letters containing death threats. I don’t take much notice of them though I do report the threats to the police, just in case. I’ve even been told that someone has carried a kavadi during the Thaipusam festival to take revenge on me so that I will die. Of course, this sort of thing worries my family, but I see it as part of my job. You have to take the good with the bad.

  I think I turn down about 10 per cent of the cases that I’m offered. For me to consider taking on a case, I will always insist that the accused has to be honest with me. How can I defend him in court if he lies to me? It makes me look bad if the prosecution picks up on something he didn’t tell me or lied to me about. This can have nasty repercussions on my defence of the accused. My client must also trust that I will be honest with him and keep our communications confidential at all times. This has to apply to all discussions made during the relationship, and even after the case has been concluded and the relationship has ceased. If a client doesn’t have this trust in me and shows this distrust by questioning my every move, I will reject the case.

  I also need to find some chemistry with the client. I feel chemistry is often an overlooked factor in lawyer-client relationships. I need to know all aspects of my client to be of best use to him or her. If the right chemistry is not there, the client may not be as forthright with me and that can lead to problems further down the road. So, if I don’t feel especially comfortable after talking to someone, I will not take on the case.

  Sometimes, the family and friends of the accused interfere too much and that puts me off too. I’ve had cases where family members would call me practically every hour which is irritating. In some cases, the accused people are very arrogant, especially when they come to see me in my office. That turns me off too. If they show remorse, they definitely have a better chance of hiring me. One interesting thing I’ve noticed in my career is that when I go to see someone in prison, he or she is invariably remorseful. I suppose the prison experience is a humbling one, as the accused soon realises that arrogance will not take him or her far. I saw that first-hand too when I was in prison.

  What are some of the cases I’ve rejected? It’s not easy to recall. I’m not a busybody in the sense that after I’ve rejected a case, I don’t really follow up on it. I just don’t have the time to do that. I remember a case involving acid thrown at a trade union leader. The victim was the father-in-law of Justice M P H Rubin, who was a Supreme Court judge and is now Singapore’s High Commissioner to South Africa. Justice Rubin wanted me to hold a watching brief for the family of his father-in-law. A watching brief is an instruction to a lawyer to follow a case on behalf of a client who is not directly involved in a case as a defendant. Justice Rubin told me that the family of the accused would most probably come to see me and ask me to take on their case, adding that they were rich enough to pay my fees. Sure enough, that same day, the family visited me. I declined saying that I was already holding a watching brief for the family of the deceased.

  On another occasion, I was in the Subordinate Courts when someone grabbed my hand. It was a middle-aged woman. She was dabbing a handkerchief on her puffy eyes. Before I could say or do anything, she pleaded with me to take on her son’s case. She said he was a good boy and it was his first offence and so on—the usual things doting mothers say about their recalcitrant sons. I discovered that the boy had been caught red-handed in the act of stealing. It was pointless for me to take up the case because he was going to be found guilty as charged and sentenced to time in prison. Her son also had a previous conviction for theft. I told her it would be futile to hire a lawyer. Obviously she disagreed with me and engaged one. As expected, they lost the case and he received a higher sentence. Not long after that, I chanced upon her at the corridors of the Subordinate Courts. She was weeping and when she saw me, she wept even more. I suppose she was thinking of my advice to her.

  ELEVEN

  DRUGS, STUPIDITY AND ABUSE

  Though I’m probably best known in Singapore for representing clients in murder cases, my case load has been diverse. I’ve handled every kind of crime you can possibly think of and probably worse. If you ask me how many cases I have handled during my career, I couldn’t tell you for sure. They have to be in the thousands. I couldn’t even work out an accurate number for this book.

  Among the many requests for representation that I receive, the more common ones are for drug-related offences. As in murder cases, the penalties can be very serious. I must say I dislike drug traffickers. I support the death penalty for those who sell hardcore drugs because they exploit people’s weaknesses. They obviously don’t care about the dangers of drug addiction and the harm it can cause addicts and their families. Still, I can’t turn down a request to represent them in court just for those reasons. No matter how bad they are, drug traffickers still have the right to a proper defence. There is some frustration with defending drug offence cases in Singapore because the prosecution seems to have an advantage in many of them even before hearings start. I’ve also seen first-hand how judges’ hands are tied by the laws that govern drug offences in Singapore. In the Misuse of Drugs Act, death by hanging is mandatory for anyone aged 18 years or over who is convicted of carrying 15 grams of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine, more than 500 grams of cannabis or more than 250 grams of methamphetamines. It is a well-known fact that Singapore’s stand on drug trafficking is controversial around the world. Darshan Singh, for example, is reputed to have hanged more than 850 condemned prisoners in his career and is also believed to have hanged 18 prisoners in one day.

  Critics of Singapore’s liberal application of the death penalty for offences which are treated with less severity in many other countries say that Singapore has reversed the burden of proof, requiring the accused to prove they are innocent. In many other countries, it is a fundamental human right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. There are still many inconsistencies in the way the courts treat drug offenders. I brought this up in 2005 in the inaugural issue of Pro Bono, the newsletter of the Association of Criminal Lawyers of Singapore. I cited the big cocaine bust in Seletar Camp involving a former internet entrepreneur. The accused pleaded guilty to a single charge of cocaine consumption and had his 12-month sentence reduced to eight months on appeal. I was approached to handle his appeal but there was a conflict of interest because I represented Guiga Laroussi, the man who had supplied him with the cocaine. In the appeal by the former internet entrepreneur, Justice V K Rajah ruled that all first offenders should be jailed for six to 18 months. Fines, he said, should be imposed only “sparingly” and in “purely exceptional” cases involving Class A drugs or hardcore drugs like heroin and cocaine. But I wrote that the court’s ruling did little to clarify the position on sentencing. Justice Rajah did not clarify what he meant by “sparingly” or what constituted a “purely exceptional” case.

  I pointed out that there was a “clear conflict” between the views expressed in the former internet entrepreneur’s case and in four other cases heard by then Chief Justice Yong Pung How, who has since retired from the bench. In an earlier case involving Ecstasy abuser Ooi Joo Keong, the Chief Justice upheld a decision by Senior District Judge Richard Magnus to jail him for 12 months, ruling that first offenders should be jailed for 12 to 18 months. I pointed out that three other cases sent out different signals. In a case involving insurance manager Ng Kheng Tiak, who had a couple of puffs of cannabis, the Chief Justice fined him $20,000 and set aside the 12-month prison term imposed by the Lower Court. In
another case, footballer Muhammad Razali Ishak’s one-year jail term for smoking cannabis at a birthday party was set aside and replaced with two years’ probation, a $5,000 bond by his parents and 100 hours of community service. Polytechnic student Pililis Nikiforos escaped an eight-month jail term in 2001 for morphine use and the Chief Justice instead imposed a $5,000 fine. Our take on this is that when sentencing an offender, which of these decisions should district judges follow?

  Another problem in my view is the use of entrapment to snare drug offenders. I believe it should be allowed to a certain degree, otherwise you’ll never catch the crooks. But the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) should not overdo it. I’ve said on record before that I think the CNB crossed the line in the case of insurance agent Teo Ya Lin in 2003. She was pressured by an undercover CNB officer to procure an Ecstasy pill for him, promising that he would buy an insurance policy from her in return. Teo got him a pill and the result for her troubles was a prison term of more than six years. This girl had no intention of selling drugs until she was persuaded by the officer. Under normal circumstances, she would not have been categorised as a trafficker. There is also the issue of whether the CNB officer should be guilty of abettment for the offence. He instigated the offence by putting the idea into her head through misrepresentation. Indeed, there is a lot of grey area in Singapore’s Misuse of Drugs Act. I believe this has partly to do with the fact that the law is so out of sync with other First World countries which Singapore aspires to be.

  The differences between Singapore’s drug laws and those of other countries were clearly illustrated in the case of German national, Julia Susanne Bohl. She faced the gallows following a drug bust at her downtown apartment in Singapore on March 13, 2002. The 22-year-old student at the German school in Singapore was arrested, together with her 21-year-old Singaporean boyfriend and nine others, on suspicion of running a drug ring. Authorities seized 687 grams of cannabis, 60 pills of Ecstasy and a number of designer drugs at the apartment. Under the “presumption clause” in the Misuse of Drugs Act, anyone caught in possession of a certain amount of a specified drug is presumed to be trafficking in the substance. Friends and teachers of Bohl at the German school said she was a very inconspicuous and polite woman. Some ventured to say that it was her boyfriend who had introduced her to the party scene and was more at fault for her problems. Bohl had been living in Singapore with her parents for about five years, but at the time she was apprehended, her parents had divorced and separately returned to live in Germany. Her father had been an engineer with Lufthansa in Singapore while her mother taught at the German school. Her mother had objected to her boyfriend, whom I only knew as Ben. Bohl subsequently moved out of her parents’ home not long before they returned to Germany, and stayed with Ben and his friends. The apartment was leased under Bohl’s name because she was the only one who was gainfully employed. She was working under a job training scheme with Daimler-Chrysler. I felt that she was an attractive young woman mixing around with some ugly people.

  Bohl’s parents flew back to Singapore to be by her side during the case. On March 15, Bohl was charged in court with two others for being in possession of 687 grams of cannabis for the purpose of trafficking. If found guilty, she would be hanged. Bohl was the first female Caucasian foreigner to face execution in Singapore since Johannes van Damme, a Dutch man caught with 4.6 kg of heroin in his suitcase as he was leaving Singapore in 1991. Van Damme was hanged in August 1994 despite pleas for clemency from the Dutch government and Queen Beatrix. Singapore firmly rejected pressure from the Netherlands to stop the execution and dismissed suggestions of a “cultural gap” between the two countries.

  As soon as Bohl was caught, the German government and its ambassador in Singapore mounted a diplomatic offensive on her behalf, meeting several senior Singapore government ministers in the process. Coincidentally, it was a technicality that saved Bohl from the gallows in the wake of this campaign. Tests revealed that the amount of pure cannabis seized in Bohl’s apartment weighed in at only 281 grams, below the 500 grams threshold. This meant that Bohl faced a jail sentence of five to 20 years instead of execution. After negotiations with the Attorney-General’s Chambers, Bohl still faced several charges but none was on trafficking in drugs. Her lawyer then was Michael Eu. Bohl’s parents later came to see me through my pupil Ravi Isaac, who was responsible for me getting the brief. After I took up the case, many people erroneously thought that I had been responsible for getting her charges reduced, but that actually happened when Eu was still her lawyer. I also recall being asked by some European journalists why I didn’t advise Bohl to jump bail. This is not the type of question that a lawyer can answer and, in any case, it didn’t deserve an answer as it showed a lack of respect for me and lawyers in general.

  Bohl was eventually sentenced to five years in prison. She’s now in Germany having served her time. Anti-death penalty activists would cite her case in their efforts to save Vietnamese-Australian Van Tuong Nguyen who I mentioned earlier in the book. I didn’t represent Nguyen. He was caught with heroin while on transit through Changi Airport on December 12, 2002. He had been on his way back to Melbourne from Cambodia. The amount of heroin Nguyen carried was 25 times the amount which meant an automatic death sentence. He was convicted and, despite serious diplomatic efforts by Australian authorities, was hanged on December 2, 2005. I remember telling the Australian media just before his hanging that the only chance of saving Nguyen would have been before he went to trial, when prosecutors were finalising the charges and still had the prerogative to make changes. I told them: “What is the point in coming in now? The President has already refused clemency and the presiding judge in capital drug cases has no discretion. Death is mandatory. It is like visiting a patient in hospital when he is already dead.”

  While the Australians were slow off the blocks in their diplomatic efforts on Nguyen, the German ambassador impressed me with his handling of the Bohl case. Volker Schlegel stood by Bohl all the way. He was a fantastic man, who gave me all the support and encouragement I needed. He would come to my office and we would spend hours discussing Bohl’s case. I have acted for other nationalities and observed that the dedication shown by their ambassadors is not the same. Some can’t be bothered if their nationals get into trouble in Singapore. Others only show an interest when the accused person is someone famous or important or well-connected. These ambassadors could have learnt a thing or two from Schlegel. Another embassy that I thought really cared for its nationals was the Belgian embassy. I saw this in a high profile cocaine case in which a Belgian lady’s only crime was being married to a Sri Lankan national charged with drug consumption. She was charged with abetting her husband to escape the jurisidiction of Singapore. A person at the Belgian embassy, whom I only remember as Claire, stood by the lady through to the end of the case.

  I visited Bohl quite often in jail as her parents were overseas and couldn’t come to Singapore on a regular basis. I persuaded her to study and got permission for her to read economics through the prestigious London School of Economics. She did well in her first year. When she called me from Amsterdam after her release, she told me that she was going to work and would continue her studies later. To her credit, she turned down all offers from publishers and TV stations for interviews. I think she just wanted to forget the whole affair. In 2006, she offered to be my guide if I were to go to the World Cup tournament in Germany. I didn’t attend it and haven’t spoken to her for a long time now. Wherever she is, I hope she won’t be tempted by drugs again.

  Another case that comes to my mind, and which is different from my usual murder cases, is the Residents’ Committee (RC) poisoning case which was classified as culpable homicide. The reason I want to mention this case is that it highlights the stupid things people can do when they are offended or ‘lose face’. In this case, the culprit didn’t even realise that his actions could hurt people he didn’t intend to hurt. The worst thing about it is that he wasn’t a hot-headed youngster. He was a reti
ree from a responsible job who should have known better.

  The year 2002 started and ended badly for former government laboratory officer Quek Loo Ming. He is in jail today because he had a petty beef with the chairperson of the Bukit Timah Zone 5 RC, Madam Doreen Lum. He felt she took advantage of him and did not give him enough credit for his volunteer work at the RC. Most people would settle such problems face to face, and murder can virtually be ruled out. It couldn’t be ruled out in Quek’s case, however, because his frustration with Madam Lum eventually led to a death.

  The setting for the 56-year-old retiree’s crime was a New Year’s Eve party in 2001 which the RC was organising. Madam Lum had asked Quek to buy 20 packets of chicken rice for the people who were helping to organise the party. Quek was aggrieved at being given the task at short notice and hatched a plan to get back at her. He had some powdered pesticide called methomyl, commonly used by orchid growers, in his possession. It was a controlled poison under the Environmental Pollution Control Act. Methomyl is a cholinesterase-inhibitor; it acts on the nervous system, causing muscular paralysis and death in large doses. Quek had obtained it at the Toxicology Laboratory of the Department of Scientific Services when he was working on a case in which a Filipino maid committed suicide by drinking methomyl mixed with coffee. Quek put about one teaspoon of methomyl into an empty mineral water bottle, filled it up with water and placed the bottle on the cabinet opposite Madam Lum’s office. This was where the centre’s supply of mineral water was usually placed. He hoped that the chairperson would drink the contaminated water.