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SINGAPORE: A Malaysian man who was sentenced to death for bringing drugs to Singapore escaped from the gallows for the second time on Monday (October 19) after the Court of Appeal overturned his conviction and found him guilty of a reduced charge of attempted importation of drugs.
Gobi Avedian, 32, was instead sentenced to 15 years in prison and 10 strokes of the baton, with the sentence retroactive to the date of his preventive detention.
In its decision, the court found that the prosecution had not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Gobi, who claimed not to know that the packages he was carrying contained heroin, had been “intentionally blind.”
The decision was made after Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon along with Appellate Justices Andrew Phang, Judith Prakash, Tay Yong Kwang and Steven Chong reviewed and overturned an earlier Appeals Court decision.
CHOCOLATE DRUGS
Gobi, who was represented in the lawsuit by attorney M Ravi, was a security guard living in Johor Bahru and on his way to work in Singapore at the time of the crime in 2014.
Gobi was introduced to a person known only as Vinod, who told him that he could earn money delivering drugs laced with chocolate to Singapore.
Vinod told Gobi that the drugs were to be used in discos and were “ordinary” and “not serious.” He also assured Gobi that he would receive “only a fine or a small punishment” if he was caught.
Court documents state that Gobi initially refused to deliver, but ultimately did so because he needed money for his daughter’s operation.
He delivered the medicines from Malaysia to Singapore eight or nine times, receiving 500 ringgit (S $ 163) for each delivery.
Gobi was captured on December 11, 2014 at Woodlands Checkpoint and subsequently imposed a capital charge for importing 40.22 g of heroin, but a Superior Court judge cleared him of the capital charge and reduced it to one of attempted importation of drugs in 2017.
However, in 2018, the prosecution appealed on the grounds that the High Court judge had been “wrong” in the decision and the Court of Appeal convicted Gobi on the original capital charge.
TRULY BLIND AND REAL KNOWLEDGE
On Monday, the Court of Appeals reversed the decision based on the new law rulings handed down in the Adili Chibuike Ejike case against the Public Prosecutor in 2019.
Adili, a Nigerian who was originally sentenced to death for importing around 2 kg of drugs into Singapore, was saved from the gallows on appeal because it was found that he was unaware of the drugs.
In order for the prosecution to prove the drug import offense, it must prove that the defendant was in possession of the drugs, had knowledge of the nature of the drugs, and had intentionally brought them to Singapore.
The court found that there was an apparent inconsistency between the prosecution’s case at trial and their case on appeal regarding Gobi’s knowledge of the nature of the drugs.
The prosecution’s case at trial was one of intentional blindness, but her case on appeal was known to man. The court found that this change hurt Gobi.
As a legal concept, intentional blindness means that a person is treated as having knowledge of the nature of drugs if it can be shown that they suspected something was wrong, but did not verify that suspicion for fear of legal consequences and had reasonable means . to discover the truth.
“The doctrine of intentional blindness is justified by the need to deal with accused persons who attempt to escape liability by deliberately avoiding actual knowledge,” said Chief Justice Menon, who delivered the decision.
The court in the Adili case had recently highlighted the need to keep the concepts of actual knowledge and deliberate blindness separate and distinct.
To establish that Gobi was willfully blind to the nature of the drugs, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt, among other factors, that Gobi had a clear, well-founded, and directed suspicion that what he was told or led to believe about the nature of the drugs was false.
The court determined that the prosecution had not proven this element. Gobi had received separate assurances from Vinod and a second person that the drugs were “disco drugs” and “not … very dangerous.”
When Gobi inspected the drugs, he saw that they appeared to have been mixed with chocolate. The prosecution did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that, despite this, Gobi suspected that he had not been informed about the true nature of the drugs.
Therefore, the court determined that Gobi was not intentionally blind to the nature of the drugs.
“Under the circumstances, the applicant’s conviction for the capital position cannot be upheld, and we set aside that conviction,” said Chief Justice Menon.
NON-CONTROVERSIAL FOR LEGAL CHARGE TO CHANGE: COURT
The decision was due to three circumstances: that the case of the prosecution at the trial was that Gobi was deliberately blind to the nature of the drugs and had no real knowledge of their nature; that the prosecution presented a different case on appeal that Gobi had actual knowledge of the nature of the drugs; and that there was a change in the legal position on the doctrine of intentional blindness.
“It is likely that if any of these three circumstances had been absent, the result of this criminal motion could have been different,” said Chief Justice Menon.
“That the legal position may change from time to time, even as a result of the development of jurisprudence, is not controversial.”
It added that it is “a reflection of the strength of our legal framework that the court can, in limited circumstances, take into account subsequent changes in legal position to reevaluate decisions previously made, even if they were correct at the time they were made.”
“That is precisely what has happened in this exceptional case,” he said.
