Siti Rafidah Binti Zainuddin

On the court record

Siti Rafidah Binti Zainuddin appears in the reported corpus as criminal counsel in drug litigation before the Court of Appeal, appearing on both the defence and prosecution sides, largely on judgments in Bahasa Malaysia. On the defence side she was engaged as appellant's counsel in a trafficking appeal under seksyen 39B(1)(a) Akta Dadah Berbahaya 1952 (section 39B(1)(a) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952) concerning cannabis of 113.201 kilograms, where the accused, charged together with his wife and represented by counsel, had accepted the prosecution's offer to plead guilty while his wife was acquitted and discharged, the appeal being directed at sentence. In another appeal she argued the evidence of an agent provocateur under seksyen 40A, the presumption of trafficking under seksyen 37(da), the elements of possession, custody and knowledge, and the sufficiency of a bare denial.

On the prosecution side she was engaged in Court of Appeal appeals defending trafficking convictions, where the reported issues were whether the prosecution had established a prima facie case, whether custody, control and possession were proven, and whether there had been a failure to administer the caution required by statute. In a further cluster of appeals the reported catchwords record that the accused had the power to deal with the drugs as owner, to the exclusion of others, the drugs having been found as a result of the accused's own pointing-out. Appearing on both sides of drug appeals, her reported work engages the statutory presumptions of possession and trafficking, the treatment of agent-provocateur evidence and the proof of custody and knowledge — the recurring architecture of a section 39B case. The reported matters mark Siti Rafidah Binti Zainuddin as counsel steeped in drug-trafficking litigation at the appellate level, arguing the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 from both the defence and the prosecution standpoint. That she appears on both sides of drug appeals gives her reported work an unusual completeness, engaging the same statutory presumptions and evidential questions from the standpoint of the accused in one matter and of the prosecution in the next, and marks a practice built squarely around the litigation of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 on appeal.