Kuala Lumpur, July 7 (Inditop.com) A judge’s task ends with passing the sentence and does not include executing it, a high court in Malaysia has ruled, adding the judge is not “supposed to be an executioner”.
High court judge Mohamad Zabidin Mohd Diah said Monday that sessions court judge Zainal Abidin Kamarudin had erred when he sentenced sales promoter Muhammad Syafiq Ab Wahab to 200 hours of community service together with 10 strokes of a light cane after he pleaded guilty to armed robbery.
The lower court judge had in an earlier judgement announced that he would personally execute the strokes in full court July 15 to set an example.
The high court judge said: “If it was the only sentence imposed, there would be nothing illegal about it, as long as the judge does not carry out the caning himself.
“This is for the obvious reason that the judge is not supposed to be an executioner at the same time,” he said, adding that unless there were rules in place, it was hard to envisage how this order of caning could be carried out.
Instead, he ordered that Syafiq be only sentenced to 200 hours of community service.
Zabidin also said the high court must be careful in invoking its discretionary powers to interfere in any sentence legally imposed, particularly when the parties involved had shown that they had accepted the sentence by not filing an appeal.
He also said that the judge had erred when he passed the order of caning together with community service and said that he was only empowered to impose one of the five options stated under Section 293 of the Criminal Procedure Code. He said that combining the sentence of caning and community service made the sentence illegal.
After setting aside the caning order, Judge Zabidin sent the case back to the lower court to address the issue of community service, The New Straits Times reported.
