page_title: Choor Singh
section_title: Judicial career
hierarchical_section_title: Choor Singh / Judicial career
caption_attribution_description: English: Hallway of Old Supreme Court, Singapore
context_page_description: Choor Singh Sidhu, known professionally as Choor Singh, was a judge of the Supreme Court of Singapore and, particularly after his retirement from the bench, a philanthropist and writer of books about Sikhism. Born to a family of modest means in Punjab, India, he came to Singapore at four years of age. He completed his secondary education in the top class at Raffles Institution in 1929, then worked as a clerk in a law firm before becoming a civil servant in the Official Assignee's office.
  Encouraged by the Assistant Official Assignee, James Walter Davy Ambrose, to study law, Choor Singh enrolled as an external student at the University of London, passing the matriculation examination and intermediate LL.B. examination. In 1948 he was appointed a coroner, and the following year was elevated to the post of magistrate, becoming the first Indian to hold such a position in colonial Malaya. Following law studies at Gray's Inn on a government scholarship, he became a Barrister-at-Law in 1955. He was appointed a district judge in 1960 and a judge of the Supreme Court in 1963.
context_section_description: On 11 July 1960, Choor Singh became a district judge. In that year, he also published a book called Gaming in Malaya on the Common Gaming Houses Ordinances of the Federation of Malaya and Singapore. On 28 August 1963, he was appointed a judge of the Supreme Court.
  During Singh's 17-year career on the bench, 105 of his judgments were reported in the law reports. Particularly noted for his criminal judgments, he was known as "the Hanging Judge" for handing down a large number of capital sentences. He was the first judge in Singapore to impose the death penalty on a woman, Mimi Wong, a cabaret singer who murdered her Japanese lover's wife in 1970. In a 1996 interview with The Straits Times, he said: "I'm satisfied that I've made no mistake and that I've done my duty according to the law." All the five judgments he wrote as a member of the Court of Criminal Appeal were upheld by the Privy Council, then Singapore's highest appellate court.
  In an oral history interview, Singh said that one of the murder trials that he had presided over, the "Body in the Box" case, led to the abolition of jury trials in Singapore criminal cases. Following the trial of a young man, Freddy Tan, for the murder of his friend whose decomposed body was found stuffed into a box, Singh agreed with the jury to convict Tan of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and sentence him to life imprisonment. However, he later learnt that in the jury room a bullying Dutch juror had wanted to impose the death penalty, but because the other jurors disliked his attitude they voted to impose a lower verdict on Tan. The father of the deceased felt an injustice had been done and went to see the Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Lee then sent for Singh, and Singh informed him of what had happened with the jurors. Lee asked Singh, "Well what do you think. Shall I abolish the jury?" Singh replied that if he had tried Tan without a jury, he would have convicted him of murder without hesitation. Following a public inquiry, jury trials were abolished for all criminal cases in 1969.
  Between 1967 and 1979, Singh was also Commissioner of the Land Acquisition Appeals Board. In 1972, in the case of Gian Singh & Co. Ltd. v. Banque de L'Indochine, Singh wrote a dissenting opinion – uncommon in Singapore – when sitting in the Court of Appeal with Chief Justice Wee Chong Jin and Justice Tan Ah Tah. An honorary member of the Law Society of Singapore, he retired as a judge on 30 November 1980.
caption: A hallway of the Old Supreme Court Building where Choor Singh worked, photographed on 29 July 2008
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