Crown witness is often found in criminal offense cases where the cases are
inclusions and within them, splitsing or a case file division mechanism happens. The
position of a crown witness is not explained explicitly in the criminal code procedure
(KUHAP) and considering that it is an important instrument in criminal justice system
enforcement, this paper will review how law position before a crown witness in criminal
justice system.
This final project uses normative law study and the data source was obtained from
primary law materials viz. related constitutions, secondary law materials namely theories
and literature and also tertiary law materials or Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia. The
standard used to measure the problems in this research project is whether the position of
a crown witness is valid in criminal justice system or not. This paper was done by
secondary data-based approach and was followed by reviewing the interview results as
supporting data.
The result from this paper shows that in a criminal justice system, the position of a
crown witness is legal according to the law based on certain principles viz. inclusion
characteristic and the lack of evidence in a case which is done by splitsing or a case
division file mechanism. Based on this result, the author of this paper suggests that to
support the implementation of ‘fair trial’ principles, the exertion of the crown witness
needs to be reconsidered because it is against the essence as a suspect in regards to fulfill
the basic rights of a suspect and the position of a crown witness should be clearly and
explicitly defined in criminal code procedure bills.