Mangaiarkarasi a/p Krishnan

On the court record

Mangaiarkarasi a/p Krishnan appears in the corpus on the prosecution side, appearing for the Public Prosecutor (Pendakwa Raya) in serious criminal appeals in the Federal Court (Mahkamah Persekutuan) and the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan). Two Federal Court matters concerned the law of homicide and, in particular, the proof of the elements of murder under 'seksyen 300(c) Kanun Keseksaan' (section 300(c) of the Penal Code). The court's framing, in Malay, addressed the 'beban pembuktian 3 elemen' (the burden of proving the three elements) of that limb, and turned on whether the injury inflicted on the deceased was 'mencukupi pada lazimnya untuk menyebabkan kematian' — expressly glossed in the judgment itself as 'sufficient in ordinary course of nature to cause death' — together with the ingredients of the lesser offence of culpable homicide under 'seksyen 304(a) Kanun Keseksaan' (section 304(a) of the Penal Code) and the law of abetment. These are among the most closely analysed questions in Malaysian homicide law, since the presence or absence of that objective sufficiency of injury marks the boundary between murder and culpable homicide not amounting to murder. A third matter, in the Court of Appeal, was a high-profile corruption appeal arising from a solar-power project, in which charges under 'seksyen 16(a)(A) Akta SPRM 2009' (section 16(a)(A) of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission Act 2009) had been jointly tried, and which raised, among other things, an application concerning the recusal of the trial judge and a controversy over the integrity of a third-party document and a leaked draft judgment. The corruption appeal in particular illustrates how much of a modern trial of that kind is fought over process as well as substance — applications for the trial judge to recuse himself, disputes about the authenticity of documents, and the fallout from a leaked draft judgment — all of which the prosecution must meet in defending a conviction on appeal. Across the appearances the practice is that of prosecuting counsel engaged at the appellate level in homicide and major corruption cases, where the precise ingredients of the offence and the integrity of the trial process are decisive.