Justice Choor Singh
IHFS Excellence Award For Legal Contribution
The common putative that he was Singapore’s most feared judge is without question. Known as the ‘hanging’ judge, Justice Choor Singh Sidhu was born in Punjab, in India, on 19 January 1911. At a very young age – which was before school-going age in Singapore – he came to the city-state to be with his father who then was a security guard (or called a jaga). It was a profession Sikhs, in those pioneering days of Singapore’s history, lionised apart from being in the armed forces.
His early schooling years in Singapore’s Outram district were hard-bitten ones for the young justice-to-be. He would occasionally walk to school – as he could not afford public transport – and slept at totally unfriendly and unhygienic places and studying as often as he could with none of the creature comforts that modern-day Singapore has afforded its denizens.
Those privations and severe drawbacks did not deter Sidhu. He topped his ‘O’ level examinations at Raffles Institution in 1929.
But those tenuous times were bitter for the man who had a formative role in the abolition of jury trial in Singapore. For some three years he worked as a clerk in a law firm for a salary of just a middling sum, eventually joining the Government Clerical Services for 60 Straits dollars a month.
In no time Singh was at the Official Assignee’s office where a fatalistic turn of events ‘snared’ him into meeting James Walter Davy Ambrose – a latter-day High Court judge – who egged him to read law.
That monumental piece of advice was a pivotal turning point in the life of the young Sidhu. Ever the industrious person, Singh read law books in his leisure time. But a fortuitous turn of events was soon to follow. In a change of rules, Singh took his examinations as an external student at the University of London and in 1948 passed his intermediate LL.B examinations.
He soon became a coroner and began donning spurs when he became the first Indian to become a magistrate. In the meantime, he continued his law studies at Gray’s Inn #.
Singh was appointed a district judge in 1960 and a judge of the Supreme Court in 1963. Especially noted for his criminal judgments, Singh was the first Singapore judge to impose the death penalty on a woman, named Mimi Wong, who was convicted of killing the wife of her Japanese lover.
Sidhu retired as a judge on 30 November 1980.
A keen cricketer when young, Singh also took up playing golf and was once the president of the Singapore Khalsa Association, among the myriad appointments he took up.
A savant by nature Singh contributed to his community’s educational charities and other educational causes and was a trustee of the Singapore Sikh Education Foundation.
For two years before his death, Singh had found it difficult to walk. He died in his bed on 31 March 2009 aged 98, leaving behind two sons, Duleep Singh Sidhu and Dr. Daljeet Singh Sidhu, and a daughter, Manjeet Kaur Sidhu.