Fadley Faisal
The Magistrate’s Court on May 13 retracted the guilty plea of a sexual offender seeing it would be unsafe to let the conviction stand.
The defendant, a local man, was convicted on his own guilty plea on April 6 for a charge of outraging the modesty of a female colleague and was scheduled for sentencing on April 17.
On the scheduled sentencing day, the defendant hired defence counsel Pengiran Khairul Nizam bin Pengiran Haji Mohd Yassin of Messrs Yusof Halim and Partners.
The lawyer sought for time to look into the case documents, where then Acting Senior Magistrate Dewi Norlelawati binti Haji Abdul Hamid adjourned the case initially to April 20, but due to technical complications eventually mentioned on April 29.
On that day via Zoom, the defence counsel sought for the court to retract his client’s guilty plea.
The defence argued that his client did not fully understand the charge read to him on April 6, thinking he was admitting to an alleged incident that occurred sometime in March, instead of the incident allegedly occurring on March 25.
The defence stated that the charge read to the defendant was not consistent to the incident to what the defendant admitted to in his recorded police statements made on April 5.
In that statement, the defendant “clearly stated that there was no such incident of the alleged offence being committed on March 25”, the defence claimed.
The court then retracted the defendant’s guilty plea in the interests of justice, after agreeing with the defence contention that it would be unsafe to allow the conviction to stand.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Raihan Nabilah binti Haji Ahmad Ghazali prosecuted the case.
