Asriyadi Bin Bakri v Pendakwa Raya

Case Significance

Illustrates how a defendant's flight and the discarding of a bag of drugs on encountering the police support an inference of knowledge sufficient to engage the trafficking presumption under section 39B(1)(a) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952, and that the non-production of collateral evidence does not by itself render the conviction unsafe.

This Court of Appeal decision concerns an appeal against conviction and sentence for drug trafficking under section 39B(1)(a) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952, turning on the proof of possession and knowledge and complaints about the treatment of the defence. The appellant had been convicted in the High Court of trafficking in 64.83 grams of methamphetamine and sentenced to life imprisonment, meaning 30 years, together with twelve strokes of whipping. The prosecution case was that a police team, acting on a tip-off, kept a roadside area under surveillance and saw the appellant walking alone carrying a plastic bag; when the officers identified themselves he fled and threw the bag onto the road, and on being apprehended the bag was recovered and found to contain packets of methamphetamine. On appeal the appellant argued that the High Court had wrongly dismissed his defence as an afterthought, or alternatively had failed properly to consider it, and that the court should have drawn an adverse inference from the non-production of his handphone and of a fingerprint report. The Court held that a prima facie case had been correctly found, that the element of possession was satisfied because the officer had seen the appellant carrying the bag containing the drugs, and that there was no break in the chain of evidence and no successful challenge to the science officer's verification of the nature and weight of the drug. It held that the appellant's flight and his discarding of the bag on encountering the police supported the inference that he knew of the drugs, and that the presumption of trafficking had not been rebutted on the balance of probabilities, no reasonable doubt having been raised. Satisfied that the conviction was safe and that the sentence was the minimum prescribed by law, the Court dismissed the appeal and affirmed the decision of the High Court. The judgment is a useful illustration of how flight and the discarding of drugs support an inference of knowledge in a trafficking prosecution.