A MAN is charged with a crime. After a trial, he is acquitted and goes free. Does that mean he is innocent?

Not necessarily.

Witnesses may have changed their evidence or a technicality may have got in the way. The end result: The prosecution is unable to convince the judge that the man had done the deed.

And once there is a reasonable doubt as to his guilt, duty requires that the judge acquit the man.

Said Law Minister K. Shanmugam in Parliament on Monday: ‘It is entirely possible for a person to have committed acts which amount to a crime and yet, there may be no conviction. No serious lawyer will question this possibility.”

He was responding to two lawyer-MPs, who wanted him to clarify the position of the Attorney-General on the subject of acquittals.

The issue of guilt and innocence has been in the air since mid-May when AG Walter Woon stated that an acquitted person may be ‘not guilty” in law, but guilty in fact.

Two months later, Appeal Court Judge V K Rajah weighed in on the issue, noting that such comments could undermine confidence in the courts’ verdicts and the criminal justice system which is predicated on the doctrine of ‘innocent until proven guilty”.

Not so, said Mr Shanmugam.

He described the presumption of innocence as an ‘important and fundamental principle” which the Government is ‘absolutely committed to upholding.”

‘There is no intention to question or qualify that principle in any way. I am surprised that any doubt should at all have arisen about this,” he said.

More here..

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This is all very interesting. Which brings me to the point of something that had been niggling at the back of my mind since I read about it a few years ago.

JBJ was the first opposition party candidate to be elected a Member of Parliament (MP) in Singapore, 16 years after the country gained independence.

This was what the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had to say on this episode when they delivered their judgment, allowing Jeyaretnam’s appeal against being struck off from the roll of Singapore lawyers:

“Their Lordships have to record their deep disquiet that by a series of misjudgments, the appellant and his co-accused Wong, have suffered a grievous injustice. They have been fined, imprisoned and publicly disgraced for offences of which they are not guilty. The appellant, in addition, has been deprived of his seat in Parliament and disqualified for a year from practising his profession. Their Lordships order restores him to the roll of advocates and solicitors of the Supreme Court of Singapore, but, because of the course taken by the criminal proceedings, their Lordships have no power to right the other wrongs which the appellant and Wong have suffered. Their only prospect of redress, their Lordships understand, will be by way of petition for pardon to the President of the Republic of Singapore.”

Very interesting.