This comes after a three-member bench led by Justice Abu Bakar Jais unanimously granted Joseph Anthony leave to challenge a Court of Appeal ruling.
Abu Bakar said the applicant had met the threshold under Section 96 of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964, allowing the substantive merits of the case to be heard.
However, the bench only agreed to deliberate on one question of law: whether a government medical officer performing a post-mortem under Section 331 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) owes a duty to the state, to private individuals like Joseph, or to both.
Justices Nallini Pathmanathan and Azimah Omar also heard the application.
Lawyers M Visvanathan, K Selva Kumaran, V Sanjay Nathan and Pushan Qin Nathan acted for Joseph while senior federal counsel Ahmad Hanir Hambaly, Zetty Zurina Kamaruddin and Shazreen Nadia Zulkipli appeared for the government.
Last year, Joseph filed 12 legal questions to persuade the apex court to grant him leave to appeal.
Leave is only granted if there are novel constitutional or legal questions of public importance raised for the first time.
On Aug 26, Justice Collin Lawrence Sequerah, who led a three-member Court of Appeal bench, said Joseph had only filed the action on behalf of the estate of his son based on the intitulement, or title of the pleadings.
Sequerah said it should have been filed in his personal capacity. However, Joseph said he had done so in both capacities.
In affirming a High Court ruling handed down three years ago, Sequerah, now a Federal Court judge, also said the suit was time-barred as it was filed outside the prescribed statutory period.
The government argued that the lawsuit should have been filed by or before Nov 17, 2013 – three years after Dr Sebastian Joseph’s death.
Joseph, who filed his civil suit in 2018, however claimed he was entitled to bring the action any time before 2019 – calculated from the release of a second post-mortem report by two pathologists appointed by the family.
The Court of Appeal also found that medical officer Dr Arif Rasat was qualified under Section 331 of the CPC to conduct the post-mortem on the deceased.
In 2019, a coroner’s court in Alor Setar issued an open verdict in Sebastian’s case, saying the inquest it conducted had failed to definitively determine whether he committed suicide or died of natural causes or foul play.
The conducting officer from the Attorney-General’s Chambers took the position that Sebastian had died from natural causes.
Joseph claimed that the initial post-mortem was not conducted in accordance with professional medical standards. He alleged in his statement of claim that the investigating officer had failed to conduct a thorough probe and merely handed over the deceased’s body to Langkawi Hospital.
He also claimed that no actual post-mortem was conducted on the deceased, as only a few incisions were made on the body.
Sebastian, 30, was discovered lifeless in his government quarters in Padang Matsirat on Nov 17, 2010 – hours after his brother, Anthony, filed a police report saying that he could not be reached.
Sebastian, a medical officer at the Kuah government clinic in Langkawi, was said to be kneeling with his hands clenched when police found the body.
In 2015, the family successfully applied for the body to be exhumed from a Christian cemetery in Shah Alam for a second post-mortem to determine the cause of death, and for an inquest to be held.