Khairuzzaman Ridha

On the court record

Khairuzzaman Ridha appears in the reported corpus as criminal counsel in serious offences before the Court of Appeal, acting on both the defence and respondent sides. In a homicide appeal he was engaged as respondent's counsel where the central question was whether the High Court judge had erred in amending the charge from murder under section 302 of the Penal Code to culpable homicide not amounting to murder under section 304(a) at the close of the defence case, the matter also engaging section 34 on common intention. His drug-defence work appears in a Court of Appeal appeal under section 39B(1)(a) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952, where the grounds included whether section 182A of the Criminal Procedure Code had been complied with, whether the defence had been fully considered at the close of the defence case, and whether the prosecution's failure to offer the tenant of the premises as a witness had deprived the accused of a fair opportunity.

He was also engaged in a cluster of Court of Appeal appeals concerning convictions for criminal breach of trust and the dishonest misappropriation of property under sections 405 and 403 of the Penal Code, argued together with a money-laundering charge under section 4(1)(b) of the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001 and questions of abetment, the appeal testing whether the High Court had correctly found the elements established. Across these reported decisions he moves between defending an accused and resisting an appeal, and the matters engage the amendment of charges, the statutory safeguards of a drug trial and the elements of criminal breach of trust and money laundering. The reported matters mark Khairuzzaman Ridha as counsel engaged in serious criminal litigation at the appellate level, from homicide to drug trafficking to financial crime. The homicide appeal in particular raised the recurring question of when a trial court may properly reduce a murder charge to culpable homicide not amounting to murder on the evidence led by the defence, a question that sits at the heart of the reported reasoning.