Wednesday, February 21, 2007
I had an outing to the supreme court today. We met at 9 for breakfast before sauntering over to the Supreme Court, and who do we see but 2 other law yr 1s as well! haha Ben Liew and Joshua were there, for the same purpose as us; we all just wanted to see the appeal case and see how our SG appear before the court. However, we didnt anticipate the CA being full; apparently the pensioners were more anxious to see if they can get their pensions after all. We got chased out of the court, but not before seeing the justices taking their seats. They even had 1 baliff each to help them with their seats!
with our plan thwarted, we decided to head over to the sub courts, and promptly found ourselves in a sentencing court. This is when you really see the drawbacks of our criminal justice system. We saw this young punk appearing for a fighting and staring incident, and he was remanded until mar 14 corz the court wanted a probation report. We saw this foreign worker who fought with another person and got 4 months in jail; his mitigation plea was that he had a sickly mother back home and still had to pay 4500 out of his 6000 debt. all the sorrowful pleas were contrasted with the DPP who was reading off her script; something you will get slaughtered for if u try as much in LAWR. the foreign worker's lawyer also didnt do much of a job helping him to mitigate.
The funniest thing though, was to see the police asking all the accused whether they had cigs with them, and to give them to their family members first. I think it has got to do with them not being able to keep the cigs with them if they got remanded.
The next sentencing court is even more sad. we saw 3 accused who were sentenced to abt a year in jail, for they were repeated offenders. they had to do their mitigation in person, and each of them had their own sob story abt how they got out of jail and now hold steady jobs, and that they did not intend to commit the crime. At least the judge let them have their say in court, but ultimately he crushed their hopes for a minimum fine with the words, "your request for a minimum fine cannot be acceded to". The second accused tried to further mitigate his case, only for the judge to say "next case". As we left, i was wondering how many of them appearing before the judge today can actually go back home for dinner? I guess not many of them at all.
More Fuzzy Logic @ 9:49 PM
Archives
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007
June 2007
July 2007
August 2007
September 2007
October 2007
November 2007
January 2008
February 2008
March 2008
April 2008
May 2008
June 2008
