Police officer gets 2-year suspended term for not blocking attacks on PAD
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THE Supreme Court yesterday upheld a lower court verdict affirming a two-year suspended sentence for a former high-ranking police officer for dereliction of duty in connection with assaults on the yellow shirts
Pol Maj-General Thanayut Wuthicharatthamrong, formerly known as Rittirong Thepchanda, was found guilty of dereliction of duty for failure to arrest assailants who assaulted People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) protesters campaigning against the Thaksin government.
The Criminal Court had sentenced Thanayut to a suspended two-year term given that he had served the country with a clean record and had been fired from the police service as a result of the incident.
Thanayut appealed the sentence on the grounds that he did not know the plaintiffs personally. The Court of Appeals upheld the Criminal Court’s ruling. He then appealed the sentence to the Supreme Court.
The court concluded that on August 21, 2006, Thanayut was negligent for not taking legal action against Charal Jong-on, Chaiyasit Lomah and Sumet Bunyarattapan after they assaulted Ritthirong Likitprasertkul and Wichai Uapiyapan, PAD protesters who had been chanting to oust then-PM Thaksin Shinawatra at Central World in Bangkok.
The court dismissed as unreasonable Thanayut’s defence testimony that Tortrakul Yomnak, a member of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC)’s investigative panel, violated the NACC rules by giving the plaintiff’s evidence in the form of a video of the incident. The court said Tortrakul gave them the video before he was appointed as NACC investigator, so he was not a stakeholder in the case and the defendant did not cite this reason during an NACC probe in the first place. During the incident, Thanayut had been a police colonel, so it would have been unlikely anyone would want to “mess” with him.
The NACC also found Thanayut talked to Sumet and Charal, as shown in the VCD. Thanayut knew Sumet and Charal and he had influence over them, so it was likely the defendant took part in the incident because he was at the scene at the time. Once the assault took place, Thanayut did not stop the assailants even though it was his duty to do so. The court then ruled that Thanayut violated Article 157 of the Criminal Code and gave him a suspended two-year term.
