Dominic Chew

On the court record

Dominic Chew appears in the corpus as an appellate criminal defence advocate in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan), with reported matters concentrated on drug-trafficking prosecutions under section 39B of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952. In one appeal, appearing for the appellant, the challenge to a trafficking conviction rested on the quality of the investigation — the contention that the police had conducted a shoddy investigation because the supposed 'real trafficker' had not been investigated — together with questions of whether knowledge of the drugs had been proved, whether the trial court had placed too much weight on the appellant's reaction upon arrest, and whether there was any gap in the prosecution case that ought to have entitled the appellant to an acquittal. Two further appeals, again appearing for the appellant, arose from a related conviction and turned on both procedure and sentence: whether the statutory caution had been administered and understood, whether other persons had access to the place where the drugs were found, and whether the trial judge had failed to state, at the close of the prosecution case, whether possession was presumed or actual — with reference to section 60 of the Courts of Judicature Act 1964. In that matter the court recorded a divided outcome: the appeal against conviction was dismissed, but the appeal against sentence was allowed in part, the order for five strokes of whipping being set aside and substituted with an order of twelve strokes of whipping. Across the appearances the practice is that of defence counsel operating at the appellate tier of the most serious criminal work, where the analysis of possession and knowledge, the integrity of the investigation and the correctness of the sentencing order are all in play, and where an appeal can succeed on one limb while failing on another.