A DECADE back, a Johor magistrate court convicted and fined a man a ridiculous RM100 for surreptitiously snapping photographs of a teenage girl relieving herself inside a shopping mall ladies' toilet.
To be fair, the outraged magistrate, who intended to impose a hefty fine, was severely hamstrung by the law's maximum penalty of only RM100. There was no provision for a jail sentence.
To demonstrate the magistrate's firmness on punitive court action, she penalised RM3,500 against an 83–year–old–man and three others for gambling during Chinese New Year.
Somehow, the startling disparity between the two fines mocked the framework of justice.
On Wednesday, déjà vu set in: a Kuala Lumpur magistrate's court fined a welfare home owner a measly RM100 after she pleaded guilty to an offence linked to the suicide of social media influencer Rajeshwary Appahu.
The defendant had deployed her TikTok account to hurl vulgarities against Rajeswary but the court was again hamstrung by the options they had: the maximum fine was still RM100 with no prison sentencing.
In any case, effective empowering has got to be done to the courts on sentencing options, especially on the present trend of cyberbullying terrorising the wild frontiers of social media.
Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil rightly expressed disappointment with the meagre fine and he also correctly lamented that the court-imposed fines had not just failed as a deterrent and upset other decent influencers, they also failed to trigger culprit remorse.
We did wonder: why did the prosecution chose to indict the defendant with a law with no bite and whether the Criminal Penal Code, which carries a heftier fine and possible imprisonment, could have been utilised?
We can answer that conundrum: the Penal Code is silent on digital abuse and slapping a provision against the defendant would have, ironically, could have resulted in a high-profile mistrial.
This ghastly episode revealed yawning loopholes in our criminal laws where courts are compelled to impose disproportionate sentences.
If we were to scrutinise the criminal laws, it is replete with lopsided provisions wobbling on archaic and antiquated laws.
We suggest that minister Fahmi huddle with his colleagues from the relevant ministries to review laws that need urgent overhauling, especially on digital crimes exploiting people's privacy with the intent to grievously hurt.
The government can start by defining, criminalising and encoding cyberbullying under the Penal Code while strengthening law enforcement with new powers and formalising a structure where internet service providers can truly protect online users.
The government can also pay attention to laws that check on current preferred crimes: government corruption and jobbery, money laundering and tax evasion, where certain well-heeled defendants exploited "escape clauses" to get away with it.
While we are certain that government lawyers in every agency are always trying to improve laws related to their responsibilities, nothing says "now is the time" after Rajeswary's sentencing fiasco.
* The writer is a former editor of the New Straits Times