Nopawan: Bento
Defendant
Case Status
Case Started
Complainant / Plaintiff
Table of Content
The Court of the First Instance dismissed her charge given that there is no eye witness to see her posted the message. Only IP Address is not sufficient to identified the real user. Later, the Court of Appeal gave her 5 years in prison given that the IP Address is an important evidence to prove the user which conform to the information of the defendant.
Defendant Background
Nopawan T. graduated from the Faculty of Accounting, Bangkok University. During the case she was the director of a motocycle's parts producer and distributor company.
Offense
Allegation
Nopawan was accused for posted and disseminated insulting and defamatory comments to defame HM the Queen and HRH the Crown Prince on Prachatai's webboard under pseudonym "bento" on 15 October 2008
Circumstance of Arrest
16 January 2009
Police arrested the defendant and seized property comprising 1 desktop computer, 1 notebook computer and 2 flash drives together with 1 document printed from the Prachatai website expressing insulting and defamatory comments in this case. All property was sent to the investigating officers. During the investigation the defendant was detained for 10 days from the time of her arrest at the Central Women’s Prison.
Trial Observation
Black Case
Court
Additional Info
This case was quoted as the tenth point in the prosecution of Miss Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the Manager of Prachatai under Section 15 of the Computer-Related Crime Act, where the verdict will be read on 30 April 2012
The message cited in this case as an offence under the law appeared on the webboard of Prachatai but the charge and the verdict referred to this as a website. After this case and after Chiranuch was charged, Prachatai decided to close its webboard service in July 2010.
Reference
16 January 2009
Police officers arrested Miss Nopawan and seized property comprising computers and flash drives, totalling 4 items at her workplace. Miss Nopawan was taken to the Crime Suppression Division and detained in the cells for 1 night.
17 January 2009
Pol.Lt. Col. Bunloet Kalayanamit of the Crime Suppression Division took Miss Nopawan to the holding cells of the Criminal Court. The investigating officers opposed bail resulting in Miss Nopawan being detained at the Central Women’s Prison for 10 days.
10 April 2009
The Office of the Attorney-General as prosecutor filed charges against Miss Nopawan for offences under Sections 14 (1) (3) and (5) of the 2007 Computer-related Crime Act and Sections 33 and 112 of the Criminal Code.
18 April 2010
The witnesses examination began
11 May 2010
The witnesses examination concluded
31 January 2011
The court delivered the verdict
The court considered that this case involved only the issue of whether the defendant was the person who posted the comments or not. The prosecution relied solely on the IP address and information on the telephone connection as evidence. But no witness testimony confirmed that the defendant was on fact the person who posted the comments.
From the evidence of telephone records it could be seen that the aforementioned telephone number was connected to the internet for almost the entire day when the incident occurred. But the message in the charge was unlikely to have taken much time to post. The police official who examined the location, which is a factory, found many computers, all of which were connected to the internet system but it was not clearly evident which computer was used to post or send the aforementioned message. Many staff members were able to use a computer to connect to the internet through a dial-up system by entering the defendant’s username and password. When the property of the defendant was examined, the message in the charge was not found which the officials were looking for.
The defendant was not in a position to know this in advance, therefore it was not in her power to delete the message entered in the Prachatai website.
There was also evidence from computer expert witnesses that an IP address cannot be used as a tool to identify the sender of an internet message with any certainty because false IP addresses can be easily created. If a person has expert computer knowledge and a programme that allows this, it is possible to falsify an IP address. It is therefore possible that another person falsified the IP address number in the message in this case on the Prachatai website, so that it was the same as the IP address number by which the defendant connected to the internet at the same time. The evidence of the prosecution witnesses makes it therefore suitably questionable as to whether the defendant committed an offence or not. The benefit of the doubt therefore must be given to the defendant in accordance with Section 227, Subsection 2 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
Case dismissed.
30 March 2011
The public prosecutor submitted appeal