The Straits Times
July 10, 2006
By Andy Ho
Two criminal cases were in the headlines in recent weeks. In Sydney, 12 jurors unanimously found Ram Puneet Tiwary guilty of killing Tony Tan Poh Chuan and Tay Chow Lyang on Sept 15, 2003. All involved were Singaporeans. Tiwary is likely to be sentenced to two life sentences or 40 years.
In Singapore, Briton Michael McCrea killed his Singaporean driver Kho Nai Guan on Jan 2, 2002, and, a day later, Kho's girlfriend, a China national called Lan Ya Ming. After a bench trial (one without a jury), McCrea was sentenced to 24 years' jail.
Granted that their individual circumstances were different, a jury trial (in Australia) led to a longer sentence than a bench trial (in Singapore), even though both cases involved double killings.
Some people feel that Singapore should return to trial by jury. They say we should look at Japan, which passed a law in 2004 to implement a jury system in 2009. At the very least, they say, those charged with serious crimes in Singapore should have the option of a jury trial.
Would that improve the criminal justice system? Many factors say no.
What on earth is this 'kill' word? Genocide (Mass Murder)? Homicide (pre-Meditated Murder)? Culpable homicide (Man-slaughter)? So reluctant to dial 'M'? Further down in the commentary,
Jurors are amateur adjudicators. They have inherent limits in, first, time - their lives and work schedules cannot be interrupted indefinitely; second, experience - by design, jurors have little or none; and, third, resources - jurors have neither staff nor researchers to help them.
In Singapore, jury trials lasted from 1826 until 1960, when they became restricted to capital offences. In the first reading to amend the Criminal Procedure Bill in 1959 for this purpose, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew argued that juries could be swayed by eloquent defense lawyers.
In his 2000 memoirs, Mr Lee said he had himself secured the acquittal of four alleged murderers in a 1950 riot case - as was his professional duty to do so - in part by working on the weaknesses of the jury. That left him with 'grave doubts about the practical value of the jury system in Singapore'.
In 1970, juries were abolished altogether. Speaking during the second reading of the Criminal Procedure Bill for this purpose, Mr Lee argued that juries seemed 'overwhelmed' by the burden of finding a man guilty of a capital offence. After the second reading, the Bill was referred to a select committee, where Mr Lee had an exchange with Mr David Marshall, 'then our most successful criminal lawyer, (who) claimed he had 99 acquittals out of 100 cases he had defended for murder', as Mr Lee put it in his memoirs.
When Mr Lee asked him if the 99 had been wrongly charged, Mr Marshall replied that it was not for him to judge but to defend them, which only buttressed Mr Lee's point that a lawyer with the requisite oratorical skills and flair for the dramatic might just be able to sway juries.
In the select committee too, as Judge of Appeal Andrew Phang pointed out in a 1983 article he wrote while still a tutor at the National University of Singapore law faculty, two sets of jurors offered testimony which shed some light on how juries functioned here at the time. (The inner sanctum of jury deliberations is traditionally off limits to everyone else in virtually all jurisdictions.)
First, the foreman in a case dubbed the Peeping Tom murder revealed that a 4-3 decision had been reached rather than the minimum 5-2 required by law. However, he had erroneously reported a unanimous verdict. Realizing his mistake later on, he notified the High Court Registrar but, by then, no reversals could be made. The foreman revealed that at least four of the seven jurors were totally confused by the terms 'majority' and 'unanimous'.
Second, there was testimony that many jurors in what was dubbed the Murder By Car case could not even read the oath properly. Moreover, one juror had called another afterwards to say he was shocked at the death sentence, which he did not know was mandated by law. However, he mistakenly spoke to the juror's brother, who informed the killer's lawyer.
At select committee, the juror admitted to these facts but insisted that jury trials should be abolished. Clearly, he would have found the accused guilty of a lesser charge had he known about the mandatory death sentence. Another juror also expressed similar distress upon learning about the death sentence after the fact. These lent support to Mr Lee's point that local juries were hesitant to convict because of the death penalty.
Overall, at the time, public support for serving on juries was clearly less than enthusiastic. Unsurprisingly, the Bill passed with little opposition.
Would a more educated citizenry today make for better jurors?
We do know that they would certainly cost more. Operating a jury system will incur costs in gathering names to draw a list of possible jurors. There have to be staff to summon jurors, answer queries, reschedule those with conflicts, check jurors in on the first day of jury duty, and escort them to the right courtroom. In court, they must be instructed again and either is chosen or sent home. Those chosen must be then be sheltered and sometimes sequestered throughout the trial.
Costs are also incurred by jurors and their employers in terms of lost time, wages and productivity.
Also, jury trials are simply longer than bench trials. Jurors must be selected and instructed anew in each case. Motions must be filed and hearings conducted to shield jurors from inadmissible evidence. By contrast, in a bench trial, the judge can listen to all evidence submitted and decide which is not admissible.
Moreover, lawyers typically reiterate an important fact many times to make sure that no juror misses it. Thus trying a case will just take longer than a bench trial.
And as each trial gets longer, fewer can be tried, witnesses may move away, their recall could fade and some may even die in the interim.
These not inconsiderable costs aside, the cultural context to jury trials must be kept in mind. It was the fear of government oppression in the form of misguided legislatures, iniquitous judges or overzealous prosecutors that led Americans to favor divided over efficient government. Jury trials were part of that plan: Having both judge and jury approve each judgment meant that one would need to corrupt both court and jury to cause a miscarriage of justice.
Not so in Singapore. The idea here is that it is far better to choose the right personnel than look to checks and balances in the criminal justice system. With responsible and competent officials in charge, checks and balances are less important; if they are not, no checks and balances will suffice anyway.
Here, at bench trials, the judge functions to make sure that police and prosecutors have made no obvious errors in their pre-trial investigations which help to establish guilt. Such an approach trades off what would be long drawn-out jury trials for efficient administrative decisions.
When it's so tongue-tripping just negotiating the 'M' word, how could the Straits Times cover Ram Puneet Tiwary's sentencing. McCrea was sentenced to 24 years jail. No blue collar. If his stay in the slammer is uneventful, he'd be out in 18. That's Singapore perverted justice.
Ram Puneet Tiwary hails from an extended family that boasts several legal experts on Singapore law. Nobody told him Australian justice was different. Nobody told him to pay for his baseball bat in cold hard cash. Nobody told him to vary his methods a little. Nobody told him his plan stank a mile off. Nobody told him two hour breaks in-between 'killings' was pushing his luck (And no, not even if he took a day off in-between either). Nobody told him he'd get life. Here's your update.
Channel News Asia
06 November 2006
By Lau Joon-Nie
Singaporean Ram Tiwary has been sentenced to life imprisonment by an Australian court for bludgeoning his two flatmates to death with a baseball bat.
The three men, all Singaporeans, had shared an apartment in the eastern Sydney suburb of Kingsford at the time of the murder in September 2003.
They were all engineering students at the University of New South Wales.
The New South Wales Supreme Court heard that Tiwary, then 24, had owed Mr Tay Chow Lyang more than five thousand Australian dollars (over US$3,800) in rent.
Tiwary was handed a 25-year jail sentence for killing Mr Tay.
But he received a concurrent life sentence without parole for murdering Mr Tan Poh Chuan two hours after attacking Mr Tay.
In passing sentence, the court took into account his youth and the brutality of the attacks, especially on Mr Tan which showed that it had been planned.
Tiwary was found guilty after a 16-day jury trial which ended in June.
In a 13-page judgment, Justice Michael Adams described the killings as 'extremely grave' and 'taken together, readily fall into the most serious class of murder'.
'I do not doubt there are some cases where the crimes are so heinous that, simply put, a life sentence is deserved and the only way in which adequate punishment and retribution can be reflected in the sentence is by way of the imposition of sentence without the possibility of release,' he wrote.
Said Justice Adams: 'The murder of Mr Tan is the more serious of the two ... because it followed the first and thus, permits no room for doubt that it was premeditated and deliberately undertaken in full knowledge of the nature of the crime; I consider, also, that it was committed in order to remove a potential incriminating witness from the scene in an attempt to avoid justice.'
