Irawaty Wardany, Jakarta – Anti-corruption groups have criticized public courts for allowing corruption suspects to make them their "heaven", as most graft suspects tried by the lowest to top courts this year were set free.
During 2008, there were at least 194 corruption cases handled by district, high and supreme courts, involving 444 suspects, but 277 of them, or 67 percent, were acquitted of all charges. Only 167 were convicted, according to Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW).
ICW said that of the 167 convicts, 78 were sentenced to less than a year in prison and 22 were jailed for between one and two years.
Eighteen suspects were sent to jail for two to five years, five were sentenced to between five and 10 years, and only one received more than 10 years' imprisonment, while the remaining 10 were granted suspended jail sentences.
"Less than a year in prison will not deter corruption, let alone suspended jail terms," ICW legal coordinator and court monitor Emerson Yuntho told a year-end conference Sunday.
He said this fact was incongruous with the cases handled by the Corruption Court. "During 2008 there were 27 cases with 31 suspects tried by the Corruption Court, and all of them were found guilty," he said.
Emerson said there were several reasons behind the high number of suspects released by public courts.
The first was that the suspects were truly found not guilty. The second was that the indictments composed by prosecutors were weak, or weakened on purpose. And the third was that judges deliberately looked for considerations that benefited the suspects. "The last two reasons dominated their verdicts to release the defendants," he said.
For example, Emerson cited a corruption case implicating former Central Java's Pati legislative council speaker Wiwik Budi Santoso and his deputy Mundir Syarif, who were charged with embezzling Rp 2.6 billion (US$234,911) of their city's budget in 2004.
"They were all freed because they returned the money to the state, so the judges ruled there was no state loses in the case," Emerson said. Such a consideration, he argued, actually contradicted Article 5 of the 1999 Anti-Corruption Law, which strictly stipulates that restituting state loses does not dismiss someone from criminal charges.
Director of the Center for Anti-Corruption Study (Pukat) at the Gajah Mada University, Zainal Arifin Mochtar, shared similar views, saying there was a significant disparity between verdicts handed down by the Corruption Court and the general courts.
"We conducted a study in 2008 to compare the performance of these two courts and we found that most of the cases handled by public courts only sentenced convicts to one year in prison, while the Corruption Court mostly jailed suspects for at least five years," he told The Jakarta Post.
He said there were only two reasons behind the performance disparity between the two courts – a lack of political will and poor capacity. "These two reasons take turns in the public court's way of upholding the law," Zaenal said.
He said the incapacity element could still be overcome by conducting training to improve the ability of law enforcers. "It's the aspect of political will that matters the most because it involves many factors: money, power and court mafia," he added.
Both the ICW and Pukat urged the government and the House of Representatives to endorse a Corruption Court bill to strengthen the existence of corruption courts. "The main reason the Corruption Court was established is because we can no longer put the trust to public courts," Zainal said.