Police officers around the country expressed relief and satisfaction at the failure of the appeal of the so-called HARDCORE five against their conviction on charges of coercion and gang robbery.

The 5 defendants, named after their supposed membership of the previously unknown Human rights Anarchist Republican Democratic Counter-capitalist Organization for Revolutionary Excess, were arrested 7 years ago after a plain clothes police officer claimed that they had brazenly, knowingly and almost violently brushed against his shoulder as he walked down Ramkhamhaeng Road. He later reported that 3,576 baht was missing from his pocket.

The first trial raised serious doubts about Thai criminal procedures.

Identification of the defendants rested largely on the testimony of the officer concerned, Pol Maj Thong Ngernsuk, on secondment to the top-secret Anti-Subversive Section of the High-level Office for Loyalty Enforcement. The Appeals Court ruled that even though the offence took place at night and the victim was virtually paralytic at the time, the identification was safe since ASS-HOLE police are highly trained in identifying criminals. The failure of Pol Maj Thong to pick out any of the defendants from an identity parade was not significant, since this kind of anti-state criminal is known to be expert at disguising their height, build, facial appearance, and in one case, sex.

Defence testimony proving that the defendants were elsewhere at the time of the incident (one was actually on remand in police custody in a different province) was irrelevant, according to the court. It was well-known that subversive activists had developed the ability to be in two places at the same time.

A witness appeared at the first trial to testify that Pol Maj Thong, who appeared to be drunk, had stumbled into a lamp-post, which he then tried to engage in an altercation, eventually throwing a punch which missed, but unbalanced him. Passers-by attempting to help him to his feet were verbally abused by the police officer who threatened to arrest them for being dangers to society. This witness said that none of the defendants in court had been anywhere near the incident.

The Appeals Court noted that this witness, despite repeated visits from the police, failed to answer a summons to appear at the appeal. In fact, his family had reported his disappearance some months previously. His unwillingness to repeat his questionable allegations in court was proof, the court argued, of the unreliability of his evidence.

The prosecution had introduced evidence of the defendants’ mobile phone records to prove that they had been tracking Pol Maj Thong throughout the day of the attack. This comprised scraps of paper with hand-written lists of telephone numbers. Overruling defence objections, the court of first instance accepted the testimony of a high-ranking police officer that these were true copies of the original records obtained from phone companies. The fact that this evidence was destroyed before the appeal could be heard meant that the Appeals Court had no grounds for dismissing this evidence.

With regard to the charge of theft, the defence produced a bill from the nearby Heavenly Hands karaoke bar for the sum of 3,576 baht which staff testified had been paid by a person resembling Pol Maj Thong. It was argued that the officer, in a drunken stupor, had forgotten that he had paid this money and later alleged it had been stolen from him.

Under cross-examination, the karaoke bar management admitted that police customers very often received food, drinks and other services and refused to pay. The court thought it was very unlikely that a police officer, no matter how plastered, would forget this. The similarity between the amounts was therefore entirely coincidental, it ruled.

After the Appeals Court delivered its verdict, lawyers for the defendants, who had already spent more time in custody than the maximum sentence for their alleged crimes, applied for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. The Court denied this application on the grounds that the lawyers were not the injured party in the case. When the defendants asked to appeal on their own behalf, they were told this was not possible since they were not recognized by the court as lawyers.