Noorhisham Bin Mohd Jaafar

On the court record

Noorhisham Bin Mohd Jaafar appears in the reported corpus as counsel for the prosecution in drug appeals before the Court of Appeal, argued on judgments that move between English and Bahasa Malaysia. In one matter the reported issues, set out in Malay, were sama ada tertuduh mempunyai milikan (kawalan dan jagaan) dan pengetahuan terhadap dadah (whether the accused had possession — control and custody — and knowledge of the drugs), where the accused was said to have had control of drugs in his hand and in the boot of a car, together with knowledge of all of them. His remaining reported appearances form a cluster of Court of Appeal appeals against conviction and sentence under section 39B(1)(c) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 and section 9(1) of the Poisons Act 1952, where the questions were whether the elements of possession and knowledge had been proven, whether preparatory acts amounted to trafficking, and whether the presumption or the principle of adverse inference applied.

Appearing for the prosecution, his reported work engages the elements the state must establish in a trafficking case built on possession — control, custody and knowledge — and the more contested question of when preparatory conduct crosses the line into trafficking under the statutory scheme. The trafficking limb in section 39B(1)(c), concerned with doing or offering to do an act preparatory to or for the purpose of trafficking, gives these appeals a distinctive doctrinal focus, since the argument is less about physical possession than about the legal characterisation of the accused's acts. Across the linked appeals he stands on the prosecution side of the record, defending or restoring convictions, and the reported matters mark Noorhisham Bin Mohd Jaafar as prosecuting counsel in the appellate litigation of drug offences, arguing the reach of the possession, knowledge and trafficking provisions of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952.