BAIL FOR CRIMINAL CASES

BAIL FOR CRIMINAL CASES

2.

Ms Sylvia Lim asked the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Law (a) if he will provide the number and percentage of criminal cases in the last 3 years where an accused person was offered bail by the courts but was unable to post bail until disposal of the case; and (b) specify the distribution between foreign and local accused persons in the above cases.

Prof. Jayakumar: The specific data requested by the Member is not tracked by the Courts. To compile such data, a massive exercise will have to be mounted to individually review thousands of case files to ascertain the reason why the accused person was in remand and not on bail. Even then, it would not be possible to state whether the accused person was in remand because he could not post bail or because he chose not to be on bail, e.g. because he intended to plead guilty and wished to have the period of remand taken into consideration for the purposes of sentencing. Therefore Court administrators have not been requested to embark on such an exercise.

Nonetheless, the Court administrators have tracked the accused persons who were in remand as at 31st December 2006. There were 373 accused persons who were in remand. After a period of about two weeks, of those remandees out of this batch of 373

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accused persons who were still in remand, the assessment by the authorities is that only four of them were in remand because they were unable to furnish bail. Of course there were others in remand who chose not to be bailed out as they had indicated their intention to plead guilty and would subsequently request the sentencing court to take into consideration their period in remand for the purposes of sentencing.

Of these four accused persons, three of them are local while the remaining one is a foreigner. All four accused persons were in remand for less than four weeks.

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