065-NLR-NLR-V-56-C.-S.-ARUMUGAM-Appellant-and-A.-VIJAYARATNAM-Inspector-of-Police-et-al-Re.pdf
Arumugam v. Vijayaratnam
259
1954Present :Sansoni J.S. ARUMUGAM, Appellant, and A. VIJAYARATNAM(Inspector of Police) et al., Respondents
S. C. 701—M. C. Jaffna, No. 2 {Extradition)
Extradition—Foreign warrant—■Form of endorsement—Same warrant cannot beexecuted twice—Fugitive Offenders Act, 1881, ss. 3, 13, 14, 26.
A warrant is sufficiently endorsed for the purpose of compliance with sections13 and 26 of tho Fugitive Offenders Act if it bears the more signature of theauthority endorsing ; the endorsement need not be specifically directed to thepolice officers or other officials entitled to execute the warrant.
Onco a warrant has been executed, no further action can be taken on it. If,therefore, an offender arrested under it is discharged on the ground that there isnot enough proof that it was issued by a person having lawful authority to issueit, he cannot be arrested again on the same warrant even if the officer executingit establishes that it was issued by lawful authority.
200
SANSONI J.—Artimugam v. Vijayarctnam
^LpPEAL. from an order of the Magistrate’s Court, Jaffna.
R. S.R. Coomarasu-amy, with E. B. Vannithamby and Day a Perern,for the appellant.
Douglas Jansze, Acting Solicitor-General, with Sam. Wijeainha, CrownCounsel, for the respondents.
Cur. adv. vult.
August 6, 1954. Sansoni J.—
The appellant, who has also filed an application for revision, is dissatis-fied with an order of the Magistrate of Jaffna directing that he bo handodovor to an Inspector of Police of the Federation of Malaya for romoval toMalaya. This officer first gave evidence before the Magistrate on 23r<lApril, 1954, after the appellant had been arrested. That arrest was upona warrant issued by the Magistrate of Penang, sitting at George Town, andendorsed on 22nd April, 1954, by the Magistrate of Jaffna. The offencealleged to have been committed by the appellant is criminal breach of trustof 12,000 dollars while acting as an agent. After inquiry the Magistrateof Jaffna on 9th May, 1954, discharged the appellant as he was notsatisfied that the warrant had been issued by a person having lawfulauthority to issue it. If the Magistrate had paid hoed to section 14 of thoFugitive Offenders Act, 1881, he would have required proof of thisimportant element before he endorsed the warrant—see Kandasamy r.Randaranayake 1. The far-reaching consequences of his failure to do sowill presently appear.
Subsequently a copy of the warrant, which had also been signed by thoMagistrate of Penang and which the Inspector ofPolice had brought withhim, was placed before the Magistrate of Jaffna who endorsed that copyon 24th May, 1954. Tho appellant was arrested again and producedbeforo the Magistrate. After inquiry the order now appealed fromwas made as the Inspector was then in a position to establish that theMagistrate of Penang had lawful authority to issue the warrant.
The appellant’s counsel raised several grounds of objection to the orderbut I intend to deal with only the two most substantial objection*raised:—
That the warrant had been executed once, after the first endorse-
ment, and no further action could be taken on it.
That the warrant was not properly endorsed.
As rogards the second objection, it was submitted that merely signing ontho back of the warrant under the words “ warrant endorsed for executionwithin the jurisdiction of this Court ”, was not a sufficient compliance withsoctions 13 and 26 of the Act which deal with the backing of warrant*.
1 (1947) 48 N. L. S. 449.
SANSONI J.—Arumugam v. Vijayaralnani
261
It will be noted that section 3, like section 13, stipulates that a warrant,should be endorsed “ in manner provided by this Act ”, and section 2<iparticularises how a warrant should be endorsed. It was held by do Villiors,
J.P., and Bristowe, J., in R. v. Robertson 1 that a warrant is sufficientlyendorsed by the mere signature of'the authority endorsing, and that theendorsement need not be specifically directed to the police officers orother officials entitled to execute the warrant. I therefor- hold that theobjection to the form of endorsement must fail.
But the first objection seems to me to be fatal to the validity of the arrest,and it is directly supported by authority. I refer to the case of Jackson v.Attorney-General 2. In that ease a warrant was issued by the Magistratein the Cape Colony for the arrest of an accused who was in the Transvaal.The warrant was endorsed by the Magistrate in the Transvaal, before whomthe accused was later arrested and produced. He was discharged for wantof sufficient proof of identity but was again arrested on the same warrant.By that time the officer who arrested the accused led evidence to provethe accused’s identity and the Magistrate ordered the accused’s removalto the Cape Colony. The accused thereupon appealed. On appeal itwas argued that once the appellant had been discharged from arrest underthe warrant in question he could not be re-arrested under the same warrant.It was held by a Bench of three Judges consisting of limes, C. J., Solomon,J., and Bristowe, J., that once the order of discharge had been made thewarrant ceasedto be of force in the Transvaal. limes, C.J., in consideringthe effect of the first order of discharge, said: “ When that had been done itseems to me the warrant ceased to be of any force in the Transvaal, what-ever virtue, if any, it still retained in the Cape Colony. It had been fullyused hero ; it had served its purpose. The man had been brought up anddischarged ; and for any purpose within the Transvaal the warrant in myopinion was dead ”. Bristowe, J., who put the matter a little differently,said :—“ Here the original warrant was issued by the Resident Magistrateof Aberdeen, Cape Colony. But a warrant issued in Cape Colony doesnot run in the Transvaal. In order that it may do so it requires to be in-dorsed, under sec. 13, by a Transvaal magistrate. That indorsement is anauthority to apprehend the person charged within the jurisdiction of theindorsing magistrate, and to bring him before a magistrate in the Trans-vaal. And the function of the magistrate before whom the person isthen brought is to decide whether or not he should be surrendered to theCapo Colony authorities. The authority by which such surrender ulti-mately takes place is not the warrant issued in Cape Colony, nor is it theindorsement of the magistrate here but it is the order made by the magis-trate before whom the person charged is brought. In this case the accusedwas brought before the magistrate, who considered the case, and decidedthat he was not the person referred to in the Cape Colony warrant. Insteadof remanding the case (as he might have done, but apparently was notasked to do) ho discharged the prisoner. The case therefore seems to moto stand on exactly the same footing as if the applicant had beenarrested on a charge of having committed an offence in this country, triedby the Court, and discharged. That being so, it seems to me that thewarrant is at an end, and there can be no rearrest upon it. ”
1 (1912) T. P. D. 10.* (1910) Transvaal Law Reports.
262Dep v. Nagarainam
.1 have oiled these passages from the judgments in that case because theyseem to me to meet a submission of the learned Acting Solicitor-Generalwho supported the order appealed against. One argument he raised wasthat as the warrant in the present case had not been fully executed it couldnot be said to be dead. But this was one of the grounds urged in supportof the Extradition Order in the case cited, and it was rejected for reasonswith which I am in respectful agreement.
Another submission was that there were actually two warrants issuedin this case, each separate document being a separate warrant. It wassought to distinguish the South African case on this ground. 1 cannotagree with this submission. It appears from the proceedings that theMagistrate of Penang Bigned three separate writings, all of them bearingthe same date and worded in exactly the same terms. All three, in myopinion, constituted one and only one warrant. It may well be that if onecopy was lost or mislaid another copy could have been acted upon. ButI roject the submission that where an arrest which has been effectedupon one copy is held to be invalid the accused will be liable to rearrestupon anothor copy. The Act itself contemplates the issue and endorse-ment of only one warrant for the apprehension of a person accused of anoffence, and nowhere in the Act is it even suggested that several warrantscan be issued or indorsed for the arrest of a single accused. Moreover, itseems contrary to principle that an accused who has been arrested ona warrant and discharged by order of a Magistrate should, without frgshproceedings being taken for the issue of a second warrant, be liable torearrest upon what is in reality the same warrant.
I would therefore allow this appeal and order that the appellant bedischarged from these proceedings.
Appeal allowed.