This is the appellants appeal against the decision of the Butterworth Sessions Court given on 27 October 1995, convicting him of two offences, one under s 8 of the Firearms (Increased Penalties) Act 1971 and the other under s 8(a) of the same said Act, and sentencing him to 11 years imprisonment and eight strokes of the rotan and seven years imprisonment respectively.

The appellant, by his counsel, En Karpal Singh contended, and it was the only issue raised in submissions) that the trial court had seriously misdirected itself at the close of the prosecutions case on the required standard of evaluation of the prosecutions evidence. Coming fairly fresh on the heels of his not inconsiderable feat in Arulpragasan a/l Sandaraju v PP [1997] 1 MLJ 1 , a landmark decision of the Federal Court reaffirming the Khoo Hi Chiang benchmark of a maximum evaluation of the prosecutions evidence at the close of the prosecutions case and stating furthermore that the standard of proof throughout all stages of a trial of an alleged offence is beyond all reasonable doubt, learned counsel submitted that the learned trial judge had not evaluated the prosecutions evidence on the