Judicial Commissioner Amirudin Abd Rahman said Lukman Hakim Mohamed Yousuf’s guilty plea in the sessions court was incapable of making the conviction stand because there were contradictions between the charge and the facts of the case.
Amirudin said he was not ordering a retrial due to the fact that when a charge does not disclose an offence, it amounts to an illegality.
“The charge only refers to a parang, which was not tendered but only in a photograph. There is no evidence of conviction made,” he said in his 48-page judgment.
He said from the photograph shown, there is nothing to reveal that the parang is a scheduled weapon under the Corrosive and Explosive Substances and Offensive Weapons Act 1958.
“To any person, the photograph is a parang which any ordinary person uses for household or farming purposes,” he said.
In the interest of justice, Amirudin said he had no hesitation in exercising his revisionary power to quash the conviction.
The judge said an appellate court should not turn a blind eye where the law has been compromised and the right of the accused jeopardised, and this was one such case.
Amirrudin said the proceedings in the sessions court were also improper.
He said the poor drafting led to the defective charge, making it unclear whether the parang in the accused’s possession came within the meaning of scheduled weapon under the Act.
Amirudin also alluded that trial judges should ensure that the accused, especially those unrepresented, must fully understand the nature and consequence of the charge and their plea is given voluntarily.
Lukman was charged with possession of a parang and said to have committed the offence in front of a house in Leboh Nyior here at about 5.30am on July 13 this year.
Based on the notes of the proceedings in the sessions court, Lukman was unrepresented and the charge was not read to him again after an amendment.
The trial judge only explained that the offence carried a minimum jail term of five years and maximum of 10.
Amirudin said the accused understood the sentence and still maintained his guilty plea.
The judge said the accused then admitted the facts of the case as read out by the deputy public prosecutor, who also tendered a police report and a photograph of the parang.