{"title":"Indonesia’s Criminal Justice System on Trial","authors":"S. Butt","doi":"10.1525/NCLR.2021.24.1.3","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses flaws of Indonesia’s criminal procedural laws through an analysis of the Jessica Wongso case. After a televised trial in 2016, Wongso was convicted of murdering her friend Salihin, by putting cyanide in her coffee at a Jakarta café, and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. The conviction was upheld on appeal in late 2018. The police obtained very limited evidence against Wongso, leaving prosecutors unable to determine the cause of Salihin’s death, much less to prove convincingly that Wongso was the perpetrator. By contrast, the defense mustered significant exculpatory evidence. But the judges, at first instance and on appeal, took an uncritical view of the prosecution evidence and ignored the defense case. Throughout the investigation and trial, Wongso was not accorded the presumption of innocence, partly because of Indonesia’s flawed or absent formal legal infrastructure for arrests, detentions, searches, and disclosure of prosecution evidence to the defense. It is also because highly prejudicial press coverage before and during trials is not prohibited and because judges lack professionalism. All this suggests a strong need for reform—not only to Indonesia’s criminal procedure law, but also to the way it is applied in practice.","PeriodicalId":44796,"journal":{"name":"New Criminal Law Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"New Criminal Law Review","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1525/NCLR.2021.24.1.3","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
This article discusses flaws of Indonesia’s criminal procedural laws through an analysis of the Jessica Wongso case. After a televised trial in 2016, Wongso was convicted of murdering her friend Salihin, by putting cyanide in her coffee at a Jakarta café, and sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment. The conviction was upheld on appeal in late 2018. The police obtained very limited evidence against Wongso, leaving prosecutors unable to determine the cause of Salihin’s death, much less to prove convincingly that Wongso was the perpetrator. By contrast, the defense mustered significant exculpatory evidence. But the judges, at first instance and on appeal, took an uncritical view of the prosecution evidence and ignored the defense case. Throughout the investigation and trial, Wongso was not accorded the presumption of innocence, partly because of Indonesia’s flawed or absent formal legal infrastructure for arrests, detentions, searches, and disclosure of prosecution evidence to the defense. It is also because highly prejudicial press coverage before and during trials is not prohibited and because judges lack professionalism. All this suggests a strong need for reform—not only to Indonesia’s criminal procedure law, but also to the way it is applied in practice.
期刊介绍:
Focused on examinations of crime and punishment in domestic, transnational, and international contexts, New Criminal Law Review provides timely, innovative commentary and in-depth scholarly analyses on a wide range of criminal law topics. The journal encourages a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches and is a crucial resource for criminal law professionals in both academia and the criminal justice system. The journal publishes thematic forum sections and special issues, full-length peer-reviewed articles, book reviews, and occasional correspondence.