JT Chong Associates

On the court record

The firm's record illustrates the natural-justice safeguards governing proceedings before the Advocates and Solicitors Disciplinary Board and how an accused may rebut the statutory presumption of trafficking to reduce a charge to one of possession.

JT Chong Associates appears in the corpus as counsel in professional-discipline and criminal litigation, argued in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan).

A notable matter concerns the discipline of the legal profession. Acting for the respondent, the firm appeared before the Court of Appeal in an appeal arising from the dismissal by a High Court judge of a solicitor's appeal against an order of the Advocates and Solicitors Disciplinary Board that had suspended the solicitor for six months and imposed a fine. The appeal raised whether the judge had failed to appreciate the absence of the appellant solicitor's personal culpability, whether she had misdirected herself in applying section 12 of the Partnership Act 1961, and whether there had been a breach of natural justice in the disciplinary proceedings, including a refusal to allow the appellant to call a witness.

On the criminal side the firm acted for the accused in a High Court trial involving drug trafficking and drug possession, where an assortment of drugs and poison had been seized and several accused persons were charged. At the close of the prosecution case two of the accused were acquitted; the remaining accused were called to enter their defence, testified under oath and successfully rebutted the presumption of trafficking, so that the trafficking charge was reduced to one of possession, on which they were convicted and sentenced according to law.

The firm's record is a criminal-and-disciplinary practice, engaging both the procedural fairness that governs proceedings before the Advocates and Solicitors Disciplinary Board and the statutory presumptions that determine guilt in a dangerous-drugs prosecution, and it reflects a chambers instructed on the defence side of serious matters. In both fields the firm's work turns on the fairness of the process, whether a solicitor faced with disciplinary sanction was allowed to answer the case against him and whether an accused was given the chance to rebut a presumption before conviction, so that procedural justice, rather than any single contested fact, is the recurring theme of the firm's advocacy.