What to expect at a trial (In a Thai Courtroom)
It’s from my own personal experience I can verify the following description of events is very accurate indeed to this day nothing has changed.
Brent and I had been giving each other practical and moral support since soon after his arrival at Klong Prem prison. We’d spent a lot of time trying to fathom the Thai Judicial and penal system that was restricting us in so many ways from putting up a decent defense and at times made it downright impossible.
Brent’s own trial was being dragged out by the prosecution, with adjournment after adjournment, none of which he was made aware of until he was actually at the court on the day of the hearing. This meant that he had to suffer the ordeal of getting there and back only to sit chained and stressed in the holding cell all day. When there was an actual session before a judge, it involved, in most instances, just one witness, with testimony that sometimes lasted no more than 30 minutes.
Like me, he had no interpreter apart from his Lawyer. Even though this Lawyer could speak English quite well, very little of what was said was ever translated for Brent, leaving him ignorant of what was happening. We had both long since discovered that everything seemed to be stacked against the defendant. Most of the time it is impossible to converse with visitors or witnesses coherently because of the way the prison visit areas are set up. The greater percentage of Thai Lawyers are generally far from adventurous when it comes to tackling the absurdity that often makes up police testimony in a criminal court, mainly because most are terrified to expose wrongdoing and corruption within the police force and the powers that be. They know only too well that it is not uncommon for those who follow this path to find themselves fertilizing someone’s mango trees or appeasing the appetite of a hungry crocodile or two.
Most spend very little time preparing a case, nearly always leaving everything until the few minutes before the start of the hearing, and they devote very little time to consultation with their clients prior to that. The majority of defendants are denied competent Legal representation by virtue of the fact that competent Legal representation is a very scarce and expensive commodity in
Additionally, although the criminal code stipulates that a defendant’s innocence is to be presumed until proven otherwise by the prosecutor, it seems in reality that the opposite is the case: all defendants are presumed guilty until they can prove their own innocence, and in most cases that is made almost impossible for them to achieve.
As well as this, consider the manner in which remand prisoners are treated for many moths before being officially charged: some are locked up in chains in terrible conditions for twenty-four hours a day and given access to the visit area for just ten minutes per week, almost completely denying them contact with loved ones or witnesses, as was the case with Brent; detainees are often mercilessly beaten, in many instances to death; during the course of their trial; and the manner in which defendants are transported to and from the courts when the trial is in progress was horrendous.
Furthermore, though the Law dictates that foreign defendants must be provided with competent translators for the duration of their trial, at no cost to themselves, this is very rarely the case. There are very few translators who work to a sufficiently high standard to begin with, and those who do can demand high fees in the private sector so have no interest in working for the pittance that the courts pay them. Foreign defendants can employ a translation service if they have sufficient funds; however, this is extremely difficult to arrange when the defendant has no one on the outside to assist in that appointment. There are no directories within the prisons – not in any language - that list such useful information, and it is a breach of the prison rules for inmates to have newspapers that might be useful in this regard. Then there’s the disorder and inadequacies of the antiquated transcript-recording process. A trial in a Thai Criminal Court cannot in anyway be compared to one in the
A couple of classic examples of the problems that can be caused because of this incredibly and inadequate procedure, which hasn’t been changed since it’s inception a century or more ago, were plain enough to see in the transcripts of my trial. The head police of the arresting team testified that his officers were in certain locations at specific times at the bank during the operation. He went into a lot of detail about the movements of the accused during the same period and how he employed the assistance of bank staff to record the entire arrest.
Now, quite a bit of this testimony was refutable, because it didn’t happen the way it had been described and there was, in the witness’s own admission, video evidence that could have been used by the defense to prove that. However, instead of recording each statement individually, the Judge simply summarized the entire segment, saying,’ the witness describes the movements of Mr. Hansel and his friend to the head office of the Bangkok bank on the date in question. The witness describes how he asked the security staff of the bank to cooperate with the police and to allow the video cameras in the area in question to be used to record the movements of all the people in that area.’ The ten minutes of testimony was reduced to about thirty seconds. How could large chunks of testimony be condensed into a single word and still allow the panel to understand what the witness has said and what actually happened? It is what the witness is describing here that is vital as far as the defense is concerned. We were not where this officer and others who followed said we were, and the videos would have revealed that.
Then there was Hansel’s testimony during the defense case. Altogether, he was on the stand for around two hours, but during that period the Judge, who spent a lot of time talking to another Judge who just popped in for a chat and ignored the proceedings altogether, recorded less than ten minutes of what was said. The transcripts prove that. The Judgment document even went as far as to say that he didn’t testify at all.
This is what the Thais call a Justice system, and it is this system, according to the nationally televised confessions of Pramarn Chansue, who was the Supreme Court president at the time of my trial, that results in, on average, around 65,000 innocent people being condemned to the purgatories of Thai prisons at any given time.
This article was taken from the book:
‘Send Them to Hell’ by Sebastian Williams
By Mainstream Publishing ISBN 978-84018-991-9
bravenet.com