LAST week, MP R. Sivarasa emerged after nearly four hours with the authorities, not because of any grilling under harsh light with interrogation teams making him go over and over what he knew of private investigator Bala’s twin statutory declarations, but because of the laborious tap-tapping of the computer keyboard by the police officer taking down his responses to their
queries.

LAST week, MP R. Sivarasa emerged after nearly four hours with the authorities, not because of any grilling under harsh light with interrogation teams making him go over and over what he knew of private investigator Bala’s twin statutory declarations, but because of the laborious tap-tapping of the computer keyboard by the police officer taking down his responses to their queries. I can imagine. A sharp mind who has no problem in speaking it meets one gear in the system of wheels of justice that grind so, so slowly in this country. What the officer should have done is pass the keyboard over to Sivarasa to type in his responses. (I am presuming that Siva is computer-savvy. For all I know, he could be like my other lawyer friend, Cecil who gets by fine being clueless about mobile phones, computers and cars.) Last year, my wife’s car was vandalised and I had to go to a police station to make a report to substantiate a claim for damages. The tap-tapping constable was happy to accept my offer to type in the report myself (so that he could help the two pretty students, one of whom had had her car vandalised at the same time). Recently, I completed a two-year trial (in more ways than one) in Penang answering a charge that I had cast a sexual slur against someone. (For the record, I was absolved. It was a case of histrionics.) This involved me getting up (or not going to sleep) to catch the first red-eye dawn flight of Air Asia to make magistrate’s court by nine – only to be told that an urgent case required mine being bumped off the day’s schedule; that the magistrate was ill; that the Lord President was visiting the island, so there was no magisterial presence because they were all nodding solemnly in the presence of the LP; that the magistrate who had been through twothirds of the trial and who was about to hear my side of things had been transferred down south and the new magistrate needed an adjournment while he tried to decipher the notes of his predecessor. All these meant my day was shot for nothing with the prospect of a tedious journey back to KL. Better luck next month or next year. To top this protracted dragging out of a judicial resolution to a civil dispute, I was surprised to note that there was no court reporter or steno. The court scribe was the magistrate, and when the point of contention is over language and meaning, and both sides have no problems expressing themselves, this led to constant reminders to speak s-l-o-w-l-y and sila sambung. In this day and age, when aural and visual recording is no problem, why are our judges and magistrates behaving like Dickensian characters? The wigs and ink-pots have gone because they became quaint or ridiculous, but after five decades of development, in this area we haven’t caught up with the black-and-white Perry Mason shows I watched on RTM in the 1960s where there was always a mousy, bespectacled woman pecking away in court while both sides waxed eloquent. Just after the war, my father joined the police force as a stenographer (I would be surprised if this occupation is not extinct.) Effectively, he was clerical staff with one additional skill, the ability to scribble shorthand (Pitman’s was the system, if I remember correctly) – loops and squiggles that looked like mutated Jawi, sounds swiftly recorded as hieroglyphic scrawls to be recalled later for transcription back into Romanised words. That skill was replaced by the open-reel tape-recorder. So, in an age of cam-phones, why are our magistrates being put through a daily literacy test? Not only did the wheels of justice grind slowly for me (“Sorry, I tak tahu tak boleh baca suratkhabar dalam mahkamah” as I noisily folded the newspaper), but much as I applauded the second magistrate’s candid admission that the last time he had any extensive acquaintance with the English language was on campus in UiTM, it did not inspire me with confidence – till judgment day.
● Thor Kah Hoong would like to point out to potential litigants in cases of defamation, such as by casting sexual innuendoes, that trials of this nature will be occupying a lot of court time for the next decade or two.

Source: Malay Mail – July 29, 2008