Spenser Wilkinson J:

The appellant was tried in the Sessions Court at Bank Pulau upon an amended charge which reads as follows:

You are charged that you on 16 April 1954 at about 3 p.m. at Pulau Betong Road, Balik Pulau caused the death of Osman bin Hitam and Chew Hock Choon by doing a rash act not amounting to culpable homicide, to wit, by driving your motor car No P4938 rashly and that you have thereby committed an offence punishable under s. 304A of the Penal Code.

Upon this charge the appellant was convicted and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment.After hearing the arguments I came to the conclusion that there was ample evidence upon which the learned President could find as he did that the requisite degree of rashness to support a charge under s. 304A had been made out.

As requested, however, by Counsel I give short grounds of decision because a point of perhaps some importance arose out of the Appeal.One of the grounds of appeal was that the learned President should not have admitted the report made by the accused, Exh. P6 on the ground that it was a statement made in the course of police investigation.

The material facts regarding this point are that immediately after knocking down the two deceased the accused drove straight to the Police Station at Balik Pulau and there reported to the Police Inspector that he had had an accident.This statement was not taken down in writing at the time and the report, Exh. P2, which was put in evidence, purports to have been made at 10.05 a.m. the next morning and is said to have been written out by the accused himself.

Dealing with the question of the admissibility of this report the learned President in his grounds of decision says:

I admitted this report because I considered that although a police investigation had started this statement was made as a result for statutory obligation.Without it, in many cases the hit and run driver would escape. I think one can differentiate between a statement made under s. 12(2) and the ordinary statement taken during the course of investigation since that under s. 12(2) is volunteered and made under a statutory obligation and need not (indeed should not) contain more than a bare report of the accident whereas the other is usually elicited on questioning by the police.

In my opinion the Exh. P6 should not have been admitted.Section 12(2) of the Motor Vehicles (Driving Offenses) Proclamation contains no exception to the provisions of s. 124 of the Criminal Procedure Code, and the only exceptions contained in the latter section are statements failing within s. 27 or 32(1) of the Evidence Ordinance.If, therefore, police investigation has started before the report is made under s. 12(2) Of the Proclamation then in my opinion in view of the decided cases on this subject that report is inadmissible.

This, however, is not what really happened in the present case.The report under s. 12(2) was, in fact, made by the accused immediately after the accident and should have been taken down in writing under the provisions of s. 117 of the Criminal Procedure Code, and the omission to do this cannot in my opinion render the subsequent fuller report admissible.

I would also comment that whilst the report under s. 12(2) need not contain more than a bare report of the accident the same is true of any other report, and if other reports are usually elicited by questions by the police, this is merely a matter of convenience, due in most cases to the illiteracy of the person reporting.

As stated by the learned President the admission of the particular statement in this case made no difference to the case, because the admissions made by the accused to the witness, Mohamed Zain in the presence of the Police Inspector were clearly admissible to prose that he was the driver.

With regard to sentence, whilst I was unable to agree with the learned President that the passing and re-passing of a motor bus by the accused before the accident indicated that the accused was i