Court of Appeal president Md Raus Sharif is upset that the public has a less than good perception of the judiciary. So he advised that one should not only look at selected cases but at cases on the whole .

Judges, by virtue of being judges should not feel that a decision they have reached is the best and must be accepted as such by the public as they are trained to interpret the law and apply it whereas the public are laymen who do not have similar knowledge, training and experience.

Well, it is not all about laws, their interpretation and application but above all, at the end of the day, it is about justice, whether justice is not only done but also seen (by the ordinary man) to be done.

With due respect to the judiciary, judges are workers or employees, and like all other workers and employees, they will be evaluated or ‘audited’ by the public at large as their job is of interest to everyone since laws apply to all. The public are the end-users of their services and as such are the proper auditors of their work.

The public may be ‘buta huruf’ about the law, but the concept of right and wrong, of fairness and unfairness, of justice and injustice, is well within their understanding.

Let us take just one case, perhaps the most sensational in the annals of the Malaysian legal system, and audit it from a layman’s view.

This is the case of a foreigner who was killed and her body blown to smithereens.

The judiciary’s view is that justice was done as the killer was sentenced to death.

The public’s view is that justice was not done as the judiciary failed to enquire into the motive for the killing, let alone establish the motive before sentence was passed.

The public was told that there are killing cases where it is not necessary to establish motive. But it was never explained why in this particular case it was not necessary to establish motive. As a result of this vacuum, the public still feels that justice was not done. Is the public to be blamed?

The reasoning of the public is: The person killed was a foreigner visiting Malaysia.

The persons sentenced to death are police officer. Was there any enmity between them that drove the policeman to finish her off?

There was an attempt to make the court believe that the said victim had not even set foot in Malaysia as the immigration did not have any records. But her cousins gave evidence that she had entered Malaysia. Medical evidence showed that bits of flesh recovered by the forensics unit were indeed from her body.

The body was said to have been blown up with powerful explosives that are available only to the armed forces and not in the open market. Where were they obtained from, how and by whom?

The crime was carried out in a very secluded forest reserve late at night. Could a lone person have done this?

When the public kept raising questions about this case, they were warned not to keep on harping on it as the law had taken its course, the perpetrators had been identified and appropriate sentence meted out.

But what the public don’t understand is why would officers of the law, whose duty is to protect life, have acted so brutally to finish off this lady’s life and body. They were surely not sick in the mind otherwise they would not have been sentenced to death. So what drove them to do what they did?

WHY was not answered

To the public, the decision of the court is very strange. It is incomprehensible as the question WHY was not answered and no ‘panjang lebar’ explanation was given as to why in this particular case the question WHY did not have to have an answer.

This is one case which has done much damage to the public’s perception of the judiciary which is not seen to be transparent. It is like the proverbial “sebab setitik nila, rosak susu sebelanga”.

Let me make it clear that there are judges who are transparent and whose judgments are appreciated by the public (the auditors). But there are cases, like this one, where the public don’t understand the reasoning of the judges concerned.

As judges are supposed decide without fear or favour, they should be very transparent in handing out judgments.

For example, if their own finding conflicts with the precedent set by a higher court in the past, what is wrong if they explain the position clearly, reasoning out their own finding and stating that since they are bound by the precedent, they have no choice but to adhere to the precedent even if that does not do justice as was the case in cases following ‘Adorna Properties’ in 2000.

Some 10 years later another bench of the Federal Court redeemed the judiciary when it ruled that the decision in this case was “obvious and blatant” as described by the then Chief Justice Zaki Azmi.

But what happened to those cases where the Adorna precedent was applied and justice was not done? Those who suffered miscarriage of justice as a result of the Adorna precedent could not sue the judiciary for compensation. The judge who made that “obvious and blatant” error could not be surcharged due to the special position of judges.

So judges, however high they may be, are not infallible, and their errors can have serious repercussions. The public, as the ‘auditors’ are therefore justified in questioning judgments and seeking accountability from the judiciary just as from any others in public office.