His legal career spanned four decades - 1938-1942 and 1946-1978 - during which he defended hundreds of criminal defendants and also many detainees under the public order and security laws. Marshall's most famous and sensational cases were trials before juries and assessors.

Alex Josey has written about some of them in his book The David Marshall Trials. He called one of them The Miracle Case. Many people believed Marshall was capable of performing miracles in court.

I was once privileged to have been asked to act as his junior counsel on some point of company law, but he did not need my assistance as he persuaded Justice Kulasekaran to dismiss the case on a preliminary point.

He was undoubtedly the greatest criminal advocate that has ever graced the halls of justice in Singapore and Malaya - a giant among pygmies at the criminal Bar, including the prosecutors. If Marshall had practised in England, he would have been another Edward Marshall-Hall, definitely greater on a verdict count of acquittals.

In 1955, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, when debating the Preservation of Public Security Bill which Marshall, then chief minister, had introduced, said: 'I have always been an admirer of his tactics in court, for he is the supreme advocate of the strategy of attack when you are on the defensive.'

Mr Lee further acknowledged - not once, but twice - Marshall's flair and inclination for colourful metaphor.

According to Dennis Bloodworth, a legal colleague had told him:

'He goes to court like a good counsel ready to defend his client whatever he privately thinks of him. He's a great actor, and by the end (of the case) he not only convinced the court that the man must be freed, but convinced himself that he is innocent. It's only after he comes out into the sunshine that he says, 'Good God, what have I done? I have just abetted a crime'.'

Marshall is reported to have commented: 'Only once did I feel uncomfortable. I always felt good helping to free a human being from the threat of official murder.'

As a criminal lawyer

ON MANY occasions, Marshall was able to produce creative and novel legal arguments based on the textual readings of the Constitution and the related statutes. His many fine points of criminal procedure and evidence left many prosecutors befuddled and, in many cases, also persuaded the lowest to the highest courts to agree with him.

But what were Marshall's ideas on the kind of criminal justice system appropriate for Singapore? We know that he was the leading proponent and defender of jury trials, especially for murder.

In 1978, he delivered the Braddell Memorial Lecture where he expounded his ideas on the subject. He compared the merits and demerits of the common law adversarial trial (which he identified as a trial of the person) with the civil law inquisitorial investigation (which he identified as an investigation of the offence). Both seek the truth in their own way.

He admitted his bias for the adversarial system, but suggested that it should seek the truth within the framework of human dignity. He described the system as 'magnificent' but 'less than perfect'.

Marshall expressed the hope that his lecture would start a movement among academics and practitioners to recast a criminal procedure for Singapore that reflected its values, needs and resources. In this regard, he was a legal nationalist, but it is difficult to tell what kind of criminal justice process he had in mind.

He could have been expressing his disapproval of the 1976 amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code and the Evidence Act. These amendments were revolutionary in 1976 as they departed quite radically from the existing due-process model in the direction of the crime-control model.

Two models of criminal process

LET me sketch the features of the criminal justice process that was in place in Singapore before 1976.

We then had an investigative and trial process regulated by the Criminal Procedure Code and the Evidence Act which basically provided the framework for a common-law trial process which was highly admired, if not revered, in England at that time. The fundamental principle was the presumption of innocence.

This meant that:

The prosecution must prove every ingredient of the offence against the accused beyond a reasonable doubt.

The accused had the right to remain silent at any stage of the criminal justice process, from investigation to trial.

The accused had the right not to incriminate himself, except in restricted circumstances.

The accused's statements to the police were not admissible except in restricted circumstances.

He had the right to give an unsworn statement from the dock.

All evidence, even if true, was not admissible if it might have a prejudicial effect on the jury.

The practice of the courts was to require strict compliance with the rules of evidence and procedure.

In a 1964 paper on the criminal justice process in the United States, Professor Herbert Packer of Stanford University described two models of criminal justice process - namely, due process and crime control. This paper has since been regarded as one of the most important contributions to systematic thought about criminal justice.

Under the due-process model, criminal justice looks like an obstacle course, consisting of a series of obstacles to the conviction of what Prof Packer called the factually guilty on the premise that it was better to let 10 guilty men go free than to convict an innocent one.

Marshall achieved great success under this system. Many other lesser lights also shone. But it was inevitable that the prosecution would sooner or later take note of the defects (from its point of view) of the process which had been so ably and amply demonstrated by Marshall. It must have led the Government to rethink seriously the objectives of the criminal justice process and how to achieve those objectives.

The features of the crime-control model (as identified by Prof Packer) are: