The Best I Could (3 page)

As you go through the facts of a case with the accused person, you warn him of the dangerous minefields he could face under cross-examination but you should not coach him on what to say. You can tell him what kind of questions to expect and to reply truthfully. You cannot ask him to lie because that is unethical. It is also a dangerous tactic. You can be caught out because if a client is pressured under cross-examination, he can always turn around and say, “My lawyer instructed me to say this, so why are you shouting at me?” That would be the end for you as it could land you in a lot of trouble. In your mind, you must always remember that your client can be your worst enemy.

As I will bring up later in the book, another source of problems you have in most cases is the relatives and friends of the accused person. They can be a real pain in the neck. Often, they feel that since they have paid you some money, all of them can call you at half hourly intervals to find out what’s happening with the case. Uncle will call, aunty will call, cousin will call. I have to say, too, that this is more of a problem with my Indian clients. Of course some of these calls are out of genuine concern for the accused person, but in many instances, you get the feeling that they are doing it because they think it’s their right. So, what we do is that when we visit the accused person, we tell him to inform his relatives and friends to stop bothering us because it interrupts our work. When they hear that we are not able to do our jobs properly defending the accused person, they usually back off. That’s how we deal with this particular type of problem. But having said that, we must always remember that as practising lawyers, relatives and friends are part and parcel of the deal. We try hard to be diplomatic in our dealings with them.

In fact, some of these relatives and friends can be very helpful. They can give us information which the accused person has forgotten or not given because he thinks it casts him in an unfavourable light. Yes, relatives and friends can be a nuisance at times, but they are always available to help you out. For example, they will personally bring a witness to the office to allow us to record a statement. We can understand the agony and the stress that parents and siblings go through especially when their son or brother faces a capital case. So, you have to give them some leeway, you have to empathise. However much you feel like screaming at them or telling them to get out of the office when they get so irritating that it affects your work, you have to choose to control that feeling, smile at them and offer them a cup of coffee instead. You have to take deep breaths, remain calm and assure them that you are doing your best for their loved one. In capital cases, everyone wants you to give a kind of guarantee that the accused person will not hang or, in other cases, that they will not go to jail. But when the accused person goes to jail or gets sentenced to death, the family and friends will pounce on you because they think you have reneged on your promise. They will scream at you and abuse you in public. In their frustration, they will even report you to the Law Society.

Lawyers should never make promises or give guarantees. I will usually give an assurance that I will do my best for the accused person. I’ll tell the family that we have a whole team who will be involved in the accused person’s defence and who will do their best. But the outcome of a trial cannot be guaranteed because that’s the nature of the law. And I will go on record here to say that any lawyer who gives you a guarantee is a snake-oil merchant and only interested in your money. How can anyone make such a commitment when the system is so unpredictable? Anything can happen in a trial. Usually, when we give the family our assurance that we will do our best, that is enough. If they insist on a guarantee, I will always tell them that I would like to discharge myself from the case.

For the most part of my years as a lawyer, my wife has been by my side. She worked with me when I was running a small firm in the 1970s—we weren’t married then. She was in charge of conveyancing. She knows what happens in a legal firm, and is well aware of all the trials and tribulations I go through with the courts, accused persons, their families and friends. When I get frustrated, she’s the calming influence. Vimi stopped work when she was pregnant with my son and never went back to work after that. She devoted herself to being a good mother and a good wife. She not only drives me around but also takes care of all issues pertaining to our household. This includes the task of dispensing the 15 types of medication I require on a daily basis because of my health. Her dedication to my health gives me the peace of mind to attend strictly to my passion—my work. At the end of each day, I will tell her almost everything I did that day. I often tap on her for opinions to give a new perspective to handling a case in question. Vimi is my multi-tasking princess—she’s my nurse, my driver, my financial controller, my best friend, my partner.

When she married me, she knew about my health condition. I suffered my first heart attack in December 1978. I collapsed on a field while playing football for graduates of the University of Singapore against undergraduates. I was rushed to Toa Payoh Hospital by my good friend, Choo Ker Yong. The ECG showed that I was having a massive heart attack and I was immediately warded in the ICU. I spent my 31st birthday in the ICU, struggling for my life. Partly because it was my birthday, everyone came to see me. There were too many visitors. Towards the end of the visiting hour, my elder sister, who was a doctor there, noticed a visible slur in my speech and she quickly got rid of the visitors, but the harm had already been done. All that excitement had triggered a stroke. I was paralysed on the right side and lost my ability to speak. I was diagnosed with a blood clot on the left side of my brain. With the stroke, my heart weakened and the graph showed that my heartbeat was coming dangerously close to a flat line. I believe many of my relatives and friends had given up hope. Some of my friends later confessed to me that they were praying for me to die. They didn’t want me to survive half paralysed and dumb. Most of them prayed for me to recover fully. Vimi was outside the ward, praying along with the rest.

While I was fighting for my life in the hospital, my elder sister took leave and stayed with me every day. My other family members were also always there and whenever I opened my eyes, I would see one of them sitting beside me. It gave me a great sense of comfort and confidence that I would recover. My late brother, Surash, would sit outside the ward, reading a book and waiting for me to summon him. When I recovered and could walk to the corridor, I used to stand and stare at him as he concentrated on his book. After some time he would realise that I was standing beside him and he would put his book down and ask me, with a smile, “How Joe? How are you today?” We sometimes played Scrabble and only later did I realise that he had sat outside the ward throughout the night. We also shared the specially brewed soup made by my then future mother-in-law to speed up my recovery.

The doctors considered my full recovery nothing less than a miracle. I went back to work a few months later. Vimi and the other girls, especially Jacqueline Chow and Lina Lim, looked after me.

Many people thought I would give up my practice after that heart attack. I never even contemplated it. Some of my rivals in the profession started spreading rumours, telling people that I had lost my legal mojo after my heart attack and that I didn’t have the stamina to continue. The more I heard those vicious rumours (some even spread by my own friends), the more disillusioned I became. I went back to smoking, a habit which I had given up for a few months after my heart attack. But I continued to practise with a vengeance to show everybody I was still capable of good work.

Many readers will wonder why I chose to feature the cases that appear in this book. They were selected for various reasons: some because of their high profile nature, some for their complexity and some because of their simplicity. But most of all, they were chosen because they somehow brought out the best in me. All these cases also had a profound effect on me and even now I have flashbacks of good and bad memories of them. I hope readers will enjoy my simple narration of the facts and my feelings. I have written for the man in the street, not for law students and lawyers to analyse.

At the time of writing, I was already briefed to act for three accused persons charged with murder and drug trafficking. The briefs look very interesting. In one of them, the accused is a Chinese national charged for the murder of her brother-in-law. I was asked to defend her by the Chinese embassy. Cases keep coming in, some more interesting than others.

When I was released from prison in November 1976, I said that I would write a book about my experience in prison.
The New Nation
, a newspaper that is now defunct, headlined on the front page: “Subhas to tell his own story”. David Marshall, after reading the article, called me and warned me to be careful. He said that it was easy to fall into a trap and be charged for breach of some prison regulations. I, too, had reconsidered the position as I realised that I could not say many things because my friends were still incarcerated and I would, in some ways, be breaking their confidence in me. The title of that book was to be “It’s Easy To Cry”. I started it but never finished writing it. In some ways, this book is a substitute. And who knows—there may even be a sequel depending on whether my wife is prepared to go through the whole rigmarole once again.

The floor was icy cold and I could feel the chill creeping through my body as I lay on the floor of a solitary confinement cell in Queenstown Remand Prison. I tried to inform the prison officer that I suffer from claustrophobia and this made him even more determined that I should spend the night alone in the musty, cold, dark and narrow cell. I suspected that he was silently enjoying my predicament. What I feared most was becoming a reality. I started to perspire in the cold as I felt the walls of the cell closing in on me. Suddenly I was afraid and my imagination ran wild. The fear that I felt was strange to me, for the only two things that I feared in the past were the tears in my mother’s eyes and the anger on my father’s face. Without wanting to boast, I feared nothing else then. I remember reading somewhere that the only way to overcome this feeling of fear was to think of happy times. So I said to myself, “Concentrate”. Slowly, I let my mind wander to happier times in the past.

I was running with my friends along sloping green fields dissected by winding roads that barely allowed two cars to pass each other. This was the British Naval Base in Sembawang in the north of Singapore. It was a glorious place in those days. We played in parks, cycled on trails and swam at the natural beaches opening to the sparklingly blue waters of the Straits of Johor. Across the straits, we could see the coastline of Johor. Our neighbourhood was shady and breezy, with huge, almost crouching trees that were older than all of us put together. The Base was simply a paradise for a child. Some of the colonial bungalows I recall from those days are still around today, near the junction of Sembawang Road and Admiralty Road East. The roads still bear the names of British soldiers like Canberra and Wellington.

The Base was a self-contained village and classified as a protected area. There was a swimming pool, a few grocery shops, a barber shop and a drinking hole. The only place we have today that’s similar is Seletar Camp but that’s being redeveloped into an aerospace hub. Residents at the Base were issued with special entry passes to ensure that no outsiders could enter without the knowledge of the police officers who worked there. My childhood memories of those police officers are not positive. The junior officers were mostly local. They were often drunk on duty, ill-disciplined and easily bribed. A cup of tea or even 10 cents was usually enough to sway them to our point of view.

My father worked as a recorder for the British Royal Navy. I realised later this was a glorified term for a clerk. It was a senior position though, which made my father a high ranking individual in our local community. The fathers of all my friends also worked in the Base, serving their British masters in innocuous ways which all seemed very important at the time. Our quarters, provided for by the British, were austere but comfortable. I lived with my parents and four siblings in Block 9, Room 9. It was one of 16 units in the block and we knew every family that lived there.

Each unit had two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom with a toilet attached. Electricity was free as was the piped water. Our home was at the corner of the block, enclosed in the front by a large L-shaped corridor. Just as what some residents of corner HDB units do today, my parents turned the front portion of the corridor into our living room and a study. My brother, Sudheesan, and I shared the other side of the corridor as a makeshift bedroom. We had much more space than most of the other units. P N Sivaji, who would later become the coach of the Singapore football team and his brother, P N Balji, who is a prominent media man in Singapore, grew up in the unit directly below us. They lived there with their parents and three sisters.

I started my primary school education when I was six years old. I don’t know many people who can remember their earliest days in school but I recall mine vividly. The name of my school was Admiralty Asian School. It was housed within the boundaries of the Base and catered for the children of employees of the Base. I say “housed” loosely because the school was essentially a dilapidated old building made of wood and canvas. Some of the classrooms had floors of sand. It was exciting when it rained heavily. Water would pour into the classrooms through cracks in the canvas, showering students who sat under them and splashing mud onto our socks. I remember we could sit anywhere in the classroom and, obviously, there was never a rush to sit near the canvas, especially during rainy days or if dark clouds hovering overhead threatened rain during school hours.