THE High Court in Muar has set aside the conviction and 20-year prison sentence of a 42-year-old man for raping his stepdaughter and ordered a retrial after finding that the Sessions Court had provided no meaningful grounds for its decision.
Judicial Commissioner Kalyana Kumar Sockalingam ordered the man to be retried before a different Sessions Court judge, saying the absence of written or meaningful oral grounds, coupled with the fact that two judges heard different parts of the trial, prevented the High Court from properly assessing whether the conviction was safe.
The man had been convicted under Section 376(3) of the Penal Code and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment and 10 strokes of the cane for raping his stepdaughter at a house in Simpang Renggam, Kluang, at about 7am on Aug 8, 2022.
He subsequently appealed to the High Court against his conviction and sentence.
Kalyana said no written grounds of judgment had been prepared because the Sessions Court judge who convicted the man had since retired.
He also noted that no meaningful oral grounds had been recorded either at the conclusion of the prosecution’s case or after the defence case.
“The record merely shows a brief decision that a prima facie case had been established and, subsequently, that the prosecution had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt.
“In this appeal, there are absolutely no grounds of judgment,” he said in his grounds of judgment issued recently.
Kalyana said Section 308 of the Criminal Procedure Code required the trial court to provide reasons for its decision to the appellate court.
He said the absence of those reasons left the High Court unable to determine why the complainant had been accepted as a credible witness, whether the trial judge had considered the risks of convicting on unsupported evidence, how inconsistencies had been resolved and why the defence had been rejected.
He stressed that the defect was not due to a wholesale absence of evidence, but the High Court’s inability to assess the correctness of the conviction because of the procedural deficiencies.
“This is not a case where the prosecution’s evidence was so weak as to warrant an immediate acquittal,” he said.
The High Court also highlighted the unusual fact that the trial had been heard by two different Sessions Court judges.
The first judge heard evidence from key prosecution witnesses, including the complainant, while the second heard evidence from the investigating officer and the defence before convicting the accused.
“The problem here is that the second Sessions Court judge never saw or heard the evidence of the complainant, who was the principal witness for the prosecution,” Kalyana said.
The man was represented by lawyer Mandave Singh Gill, while Deputy Public Prosecutor Siti Asmah Zainal Ariffin appeared for the prosecution. - September 17, 2026
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