Goh Cia Yee

On the court record

The firm's record concentrates on the knowledge and duress defences and the statutory presumptions that dominate capital drug appeals, including the role of the Alcontara notice and the section 37(da) presumption of trafficking.

Goh Cia Yee appears in the corpus as appellate counsel in dangerous-drugs prosecutions, acting for appellants before the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) in appeals against conviction and sentence.

The firm's reported work centres on charges of trafficking under seksyen 39B(1)(a) Akta Dadah Berbahaya 1952 (section 39B(1)(a) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952), punishable under section 39B(2). Across these appeals the firm advanced arguments directed at the mental element of the offence and the statutory presumptions. A central contention in one connected group of appeals was the absence of knowledge of the drugs found and of their true nature, framed in the judgment as sama ada terdapat ketiadaan pengetahuan tertuduh terhadap dadah yang dijumpai (whether the accused lacked knowledge of the drugs found), together with the defence of an innocent carrier (pembawa tidak bersalah) and the defence of duress (ugutan) under section 94 of the Penal Code, which requires a threat that is imminent, persistent and extreme at the time of the offence.

The appeals also engaged the adequacy of an Alcontara notice — whether it had been given in proper form — the statutory presumption under seksyen 37(da) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952, and the doctrine of wilful blindness, together with whether due consideration had been given to the defence evidence.

Because several of the appeals arose from a common factual matrix involving co-accused, the firm's submissions form a sustained challenge to the way the trial court treated knowledge, duress and the drawing of statutory presumptions in a trafficking prosecution. The accused persons are referred to here by their procedural role. The firm's record is a focused criminal-appellate practice in capital drug matters, conducted across proceedings in both Malay and English. The consistent shape of these appeals, in which the fact of possession is rarely the battleground and the contest instead concerns knowledge, the innocent-carrier and duress defences, and whether the statutory presumptions were correctly applied, marks the firm as counsel accustomed to the particular evidential terrain of trafficking prosecutions, where a conviction often stands or falls on how the trial court handled the accused's account of how the drugs came to be in his charge.