Based on my limited research, Indonesia does not have a liberal, kitchen sink policy on evidence which is considered relevant by the panel of judges who render a verdict. (Ill return to this idea again at the end.)
Quite the contrary, the only form of evidence I have so far found specifically mentioned that Indonesia has admitted which would be precluded in the U.S. (or any other Western nation) is forced confessions! (See page 224 of my cite below.) While thoroughly reprehensible, and clearly stemming from past authoritarian regimes, this hardly seems an issue in the case we are following.
Here are some excerpts from a law journal article which discusses the current criminal code in Indonesia and some of the proposals for reform. Its a long piece, so even with all these excerpts, Im only importing a tiny percentage of the entire article. Also, I have added a few new paragraph breaks and have omitted the footnotes.
In 1981, Indonesia enacted the current criminal procedure code, Kitab Undang-Undang Hukum Acara Pidana ("KUHAP"). The KUHAP continues to reflect the Dutch legacy of criminal procedure although it adds some adversarial features.
Indonesia's adoption of the traditional civil law approach has meant that few rights of the defendant are clearly articulated in the KUHAP. The KUHAP fails to make clear a right against self-incrimination or a standard of proof that protects the presumption of innocence.
The evidentiary rules contained in the current KUHAP also strongly reflect its Dutch roots. The KUHAP recognizes only four types of evidence - documents, witness statements, defense statements, and expert reports.
My note: The criminal code, as per my previous post, divides evidence into five categories, explicitly differentiating between witnesses, experts, and the defendants (this author interestingly only joins the first two together, not all three categories of those who may testify), and then adds documents and indications.
Circumstantial evidence may be considered, but only if it comes from witness and defendant testimony or documents. Physical evidence can be considered by the judge in judging other evidence, but is not deemed evidence itself.
Computer records, audio and video tapes, and other forms of evidence falling outside this statutory framework are not admissible.
Evidence obtained abroad is also not readily admissible.
While the judge must find the defendant's guilt to a moral certainty, the KUHAP tracks the old Dutch tradition of permitting a judge to find the defendant guilty only if there are at least two different categories of evidence present.
As a result of the lack of opportunity to engage in advocacy in establishing the facts, the prosecutors and defense attorneys are typically passive in court; their role in court is confined almost exclusively to legal argument rather than fact development. Instead, the verdict is determined by the judge's confirmation of the contents of the dossier through judicial questioning of certain witnesses.
Overall, this formalistic trial system leads to a quantitative (counting of types of evidence), rather than a qualitative, determination of the weight of the evidence by the judge. It hampers the ability of prosecutors to present important types of evidence, such as electronic, video or audiotapes, or physical evidence. It can result in acquittals where there may be strong proof of one type, but none in one of the other categories.
As the world's fourth largest nation by population with few land borders, Indonesia traditionally was not concerned with transnational crime and the current KUHAP lacked specific provisions for evidence gathered abroad.
The draft KUHAP addresses this fact by providing that evidence received from abroad "shall be considered valid evidence, if it is legally obtained based on the law of such other country" so long as "consideration [of] the evidence does not breach the Indonesian constitutions, laws or cooperation agreement.
The common law system has developed a series of sometimes arcane evidentiary rules to ensure the opportunity for adversarial confrontation of opposing witnesses and to prevent otherwise potentially probative evidence from being presented to the jury. By contrast, the civil law tradition of judicial fact-finding has no need for such limitations; the investigating magistrate or the trial judge is a judicial officer and does not need any intermediary to determine what evidence could be considered.
A footnote follows this last portion, providing a citation to a scholarly article on civil law proceedings (Indonesia is a civil law country, like most of Europe) that explains that civil law countries exercise more permissive rules in the creation of a dossier of evidence because they do not use lay adjudicators (i.e. a jury), who are not trained, as judges are, in what is and is not appropriate to consider in rendering a verdict.
My own example of what I believe he is getting at: the Amanda Knox case was tried in a civil law country and even though Italys supreme court ruled that certain of her statements made on 5-6 November 2007 could not be used against her, they were still part of the trial dossier.
Whats interesting to me about this article, and it was written by an American lawyer who at least then was in Indonesia and received assistance from those who are working on the legal reforms, is that he is specific about problems in the system from both the prosecutions viewpoint (limits on what can be lodged as evidence) as well as the defendants (lack of protection against self-incrimination). He never gives examples of expansive rules of evidence against defendants (e.g. ludicrously wide exceptions to the hearsay rule), which makes me wonder where an idea that Indonesia lets in all kinds of evidence comes from.
See More Adversarial, but not Completely Adversarial: Reformasi of the Indonesian Criminal Procedure Code by Robert R. Strang, Fordham International Law Journal, v32, iss1, December 2008.
http://law.fordham.edu/fordham-international-law-journal/11787.htm
While this was published 2008, Im also reading another law journal article from 2014 which makes clear that the proposed changes that Strang discusses have not yet been codified into law. That is, the 1981 procedure appears to be still relevant to the discussion of our murder case. Ill report on this other article later, as it has other interesting things to say on the evidentiary limits in Indonesia and the problems they create for prosecutors.
