JUDGMENT

Chang Min Tat FJ (delivering the judgment of the Court):

At the close of the case of the prosecution against the respondents, and after hearing extensive arguments, the High Court at Malacca held that of the two essential ingredients in the offences of corrupt practice against the first respondent, the prosecution had established his guilty mind but not that he was a public officer. The Judge accordingly acquitted and discharged the respondents: [1979] 1 MLJ 166. On appeal by the Public Prosecutor, this Court held that on a proper construction, the first respondent was a public officer within the meaning of s. 2 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1961 (Revised 1971) and sent back the case to the High Court with the order to call for the defence: [1979] 1 MLJ 174. It is clear that at this continuation of the trial, the only issue before the High Court was whether the defence had adduced sufficient evidence from which the Court could hold that there was not this guilty mind or that a doubt had been cast on the prosecution's evidence of this state of mind. The prosecution and the defence both perfectly understood what they had to do when the defence was entered on. Neither the Solicitor-General who conducted the prosecution nor Mr. Shankar Counsel for the first respondent made the slightest attempt to reopen the issue whether the first respondent was or was not a public officer. The record shows that they very correctly made no attempts to address the Court on this matter.

Nevertheless, in the absence and without the benefit of any further argument or submission and entirely of his own accord, the learned trial Judge, in his judgment at the close of the defence, took cudgels with the Federal Court and devoted at least a quarter of his written judgment to this matter. He was still of the opinion that the Federal Court was wrong and he was right and he clearly said so in his judgment which has now been published: [1980] 1 MLJ 117.

But for the fact of the publication, the judgment so far as it concerned the status of the first respondent as a public officer should perhaps best be ignored. The Judge thought it fit and possible for him to distinguish the decision of this Court from the case he had to deal with (it was the very same case), and he said that despite all that he had to say, he had no intention of disregarding the decision of the superior Court. He did not consider what a waste of time his fulmination occasioned, but to waste time is perhaps his privilege. It is however necessary to reaffirm the doctrine of stare decisis which the Federal Court accepts unreservedly and which it expects the High and other inferior Courts in a common laws system such as ours, to follow similarly.

As far back as 1833, Baron Parke in Mirehouse v. Rennell 6 ER 1015 at p. 1023 commenting on the duties of a Judge has this to say:

Our common-law system consists in the applying to new combinations of circumstances those rules of law which we derive from legal principles and judicial precedents; and for the sake of attaining uniformity, consistency and certainty, we must apply those rules, where they are not plainly unreasonable and inconvenient, to all cases which arise; and we are not at liberty to reject them, and to abandon all analogy to them, in those to which they have not yet been judicially applied, because we think that the rules are not as convenient and reasonable as we ourselves could have devised. It appears to me to be of great importance to keep this principle of decision steadily in view, not merely for the determination of the particular case, but for the interests of law as a science.

In Cooper v. Southern Portland Cement Ltd. [1972] 46 ALJR 302, Barwick CJ held at p. 307 that the Court of Appeal Div of the Supreme Court of New South Wales was bound by the actual decision of a case of the Privy Council and by the principles by which that decision is essentially supported, that is to say, by the basic reasons for it