Salehuddin Saidin & Assoc

On the court record

Salehuddin Saidin & Assoc appears in the reported judgments as a criminal-appellate defence practice whose docket is concentrated overwhelmingly in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan), with a small number of matters at first instance in the High Court (Mahkamah Tinggi). It acts almost exclusively as counsel for appellants and for the accused. The defining feature of its corpus is the appeal against conviction and sentence in capital and near-capital drug prosecutions: trafficking under seksyen 39B(1)(a) Akta Dadah Berbahaya 1952 (section 39B(1)(a) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952), where the record shows appellants who had been sentenced to hukuman gantung di leher sehingga mati (hanging by the neck until death) challenging both conviction and sentence, and the appellate court weighing whether the statutory pre-conditions for a trafficking conviction were satisfied. Its criminal work extends to culpable homicide not amounting to murder under section 304(a) of the Penal Code read with the common-intention provision in section 34, to murder under seksyen 302 Kanun Keseksaan (section 302 of the Penal Code), to criminal breach of trust under section 409, and to the sentencing procedure under section 182A of the Criminal Procedure Code. Because it appears so consistently on the appellant's side in the most serious criminal matters, the firm functions in the corpus as a dedicated appellate advocate for the defence — the counterpart, at the Court of Appeal, to the prosecuting Timbalan Pendakwa Raya (Deputy Public Prosecutor) — carrying the gravest convictions up for a final review of guilt and punishment. The concentration of its docket in the Court of Appeal is striking even among criminal-defence practices in the corpus, and it reflects a firm whose work begins where most trials end — with the record of conviction already made and the task being to persuade the appellate court that the verdict is unsafe or the sentence excessive. In the trafficking appeals this means testing whether the statutory presumptions were correctly applied and whether the prosecution's proof of custody and knowledge withstood scrutiny; in the homicide and breach-of-trust appeals it means re-examining the trial court's findings against the elements of the offence.