Sharonpal Singh & Associates

On the court record

The firm's record concentrates on the ingredients-of-trafficking and statutory-presumption issues that dominate capital drug appeals, particularly the limits of adverse inference under section 114(g) of the Evidence Act 1950.

Sharonpal Singh & Associates appears in the corpus as appellate counsel in dangerous-drugs prosecutions, acting for appellants before the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) in a connected cluster of appeals against conviction and sentence.

The firm's reported work centres on charges of trafficking under section 39B(1)(c) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 (Akta Dadah Berbahaya 1952), read together with section 9(1) of the Poisons Act 1952. Across these appeals the firm advanced a consistent set of arguments directed at the ingredients of the offence and the reliability of the prosecution case. A central issue was whether the elements of possession and knowledge had been proven, and, relatedly, whether preparatory acts could properly be characterised as trafficking rather than a lesser dealing.

The appeals also engaged the law of adverse inference. The firm argued that the presumption under section 114(g) of the Evidence Act 1950 can be drawn only where there has been a withholding or suppression of evidence, and not merely on account of a failure to obtain evidence, a distinction of some importance where the prosecution's proof rests on inference. A further recurring contention was that the failure to cross-examine the accused persons was fatal to the prosecution's case, and that the High Court judge had not considered and evaluated the defence in its entirety before affirming the convictions.

Because the appeals arose from a common factual matrix involving several co-accused, the firm's submissions form a sustained challenge to the way the trial court treated possession, knowledge 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, in which the same closely reasoned attack on possession, knowledge and the drawing of statutory presumptions is deployed across a group of co-accused whose appeals were heard together before the Court of Appeal. It is the kind of concentrated appellate work that turns on the fine calibration of evidential burdens rather than on disputed primary fact.