COURT MARTIAL PROCEEDINGS

COURT MARTIAL PROCEEDINGS

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(Representation): **

21.

Ms Indranee Rajah asked the Minister for Defence whether, in cases where the accused in court martial proceedings has not engaged a lawyer to represent him in such proceedings, his Ministry will be willing to change the current practice of allowing the accused to be defended by a non-legally trained SAF officer and instead require that the Defending Officer should be a legally trained NSF or NSman.

Mr Teo Chee Hean: Legal right to be represented

The SAF Act provides that when an SAF serviceman is charged in a court-martial, he has the right to be defended by:-

a) His own lawyer; or

b) An SAF officer ("defending-officer").

If the serviceman decides to appoint an SAF officer, the SAF officer is appointed by the serviceman himself. The serviceman is not restricted, by law or practice, if he wishes to appoint a legally-qualified SAF defending-officer.

Technical and practical restrictions

The only restrictions to his choice, for obvious technical and practical reasons, is that the appointed SAF defending-officer is not a witness in the case, and should be able and willing to represent the serviceman. The SAF officer must also be a regular, NSF or an NSman who is serving his In-Camp Training (ICT). The serviceman can therefore appoint any legally-qualified SAF officer, who is a regular, NSF or NSman on ICT, as his defending-officer in a court-martial.

Representation by choice

In summary, the present system of representation in our SAF court-martial is based on the serviceman's choice. It does not follow that by making it mandatory for a serviceman to be defended by only a legally-trained SAF officer, that it will be a better system. Many of our court-martial cases (about 75%) are straightforward where the facts are clear and undisputed, and the serviceman has elected to plead guilty. This is not different from the civil courts in straightforward cases such as speeding or littering. In such cases, the accused person is often not represented by a legally-trained person especially when he has decided to plead guilty. The accused servicemen do however, often want someone to mitigate for them so that their sentence may be lighter. In practice, these servicemen prefer to appoint their platoon commanders or unit officers to represent them, despite them not being legally-qualified.

Training for non-legally qualified SAF officers

MINDEF and the SAF have been conducting regular workshops to train SAF officers as defending-officers. A list of these trained SAF defending-officers are placed on the SAF intranet. The servicemen's unit manpower officers also assist them in their choice of their SAF defending-officer. Guides, advice, FAQs and sample mitigation-plea forms are also available on the SAF intranet.