Aaron should not be flogged—lawyer

Press, 12 August 1989, Page 9

Aaron should not be flogged—lawyer

By

HUGH BARLOW

in Kuala Lumpar The Cohen’s lawyer, Mr Karpal Singh, will write to the head of the Malaysian prison department, asking that Aaron Cohen be spared the six-stroke flogging ordered two years ago and upheld by the Supreme Court on Wednesday. * Whipping with the rotan — a long cane — was severe and Aaron, aged 22, should be examined by doctors to see whether he was fit enough to withstand the punishment, Mr Karpal said. “Also, he was an addict.

Never before has someone been declared an addict by the courts and then whipped. You should not whip an addict, you should help them,” he said. If the whipping goes ahead, the six strokes will be delivered at the same time on Aaron’s bare buttocks. Rotan floggings usually break the skin and draw blood, and, in extreme cases, can cause kidney damage, Mr Karpal said. The appeal to the prison department’s director-general, Haji Nik Arrifin, will be yet more unpaid work for the

Malaysian-Indian counsel. All his work on the appeal that saw Lorraine Cohen spared from the hangman has been financially unrewarded. “Karpal Singh is a brilliant man and a wonderful person,” Lorraine Cohan, aged 46, said after the Supreme Court ruled that as an addict, she should not have been convicted of trafficking heroin but given a life term for possession. “The Cohens had no money to pay me so I helped them out,” Mr Karpal said. “It was the right thing to do.

“I was under detention myself for more than a year

and I know what it is like in those circumstances. And, of course, there was a chance the boy also would be hanged.” The Cohens were saved by the Supreme Court’s decision that though the law says anyone found with more than 15g of heroin is a trafficker and must be hanged, it was a presumption, not an absolute. Kuala Lumpur’s legal fraternity had welcomed the decision, though there were feelings the Government would amend the law to close what it regards as a loophole, Mr Karpel said. Any such change

would not affect the Cohens. The New Zealanders were the first people to question the Supreme Court directly on whether there could be exceptions to the automatic trafficking offence. Mr Karpal agreed it was possible addicts had been hanged for trafficking when, in the light of this week’s decision, they should have been given life imprisonment However, none had raised that as a ground for appeal, he said.

It underlined that once a death sentence had been carried out, there could be no going back, said Mr Karpal.