High profile cases

One of the cases presided by Coomaraswamy as a judge was the 1987 case of Teo Boon Ann, a 26-year-old temple medium charged with killing 66-year-old Chong Kin Meng during a failed robbery attempt. Together with then Judicial Commissioner Chan Sek Keong, Coomaraswamy rejected Teo's claims of killing the victim in self-defense, and instead, they found that Teo had intentionally and cruelly killed Chong to avoid leaving her alive as a witness to identify him. As such, both Chan and Coomaraswamy found Teo guilty of murder and sentenced him to death.^[14]

Another was the case of Nyu Kok Meng, a Malaysian armed robber who was an accomplice of Sek Kim Wah, a serial killer who roped Nyu in to commit robbery at a Andrew Road bungalow before he killed three out of the five hostages. Nyu did not take part in the killings and instead, he protected the remaining two hostages from Sek's murderous rampage. Coomaraswamy, who found Nyu guilty of committing armed robbery with a rifle, took into consideration that Nyu never harmed the victims and willingly gave himself up to the police, and thus he erred on the side of leniency and sentenced Nyu to the minimum sentence of life imprisonment and the mandatory minimum of six strokes of the cane.^[15]

Coomaraswamy was also the trial judge of the 1988 Lee Chee Poh case. The case was about Lee, a 50-year-old widow, masterminding the 1984 murder of her 39-year-old husband Frankie Tan, who was often abusive to Lee and even brought a mistress home after having multiple affairs, and fathered a son with the woman. In sentencing Lee to seven years' imprisonment for a reduced charge of manslaughter, Coomaraswamy took into consideration Lee's regret for the crime and also expressed his deep sympathy for Lee over the emotional abuse caused by her husband's treachery, which drove her to ask her brother-in-law and three others to kill Tan, whom Coomaraswamy condemned as a "callous" person for bringing his pregnant lover home and abused his wife Lee in cold blood.^[16]

In November 1992, Coomaraswamy heard the 1990 case of Sivapragasam Subramaniam, a 20-year-old Malaysian and machine operator who was killed by the Ang Soon Tong while they were waging a gang clash with their rival gang Gi Leng Hor; Sivapragasam was not a member of any gang. Eleven of the fourteen members involved in the killing stood trial before Coomaraswamy for the charges of rioting and inflicting grievous hurt. Coomaraswamy sentenced these 11 youths, aged between 17 and 22, to jail terms ranging between 31 months and five years, and six of them were ordered to receive caning between three and eight strokes, stating that the death of a innocent bystander during the gang conflict was deplorable and tragic, and it was no less tragic for youths who joined gangs and bear the tragic consequences of going to jail at a young age for crimes committed as a gang member.^[17] As for the remaining three gang members, they were separately tried for the case and unrelated offences: one of them, the Ang Soon Tong headman Sagar Suppiah Retnam was sentenced to death for murdering Sivapragasam,^[18][19] while another was given 17 strokes of the cane and seven years' jail for causing grievous hurt to Sivapragasam,^[20][21] and a third named Soosay Sinnappen was jailed nine years for an unrelated case of manslaughter and another sentence of four years with six strokes of the cane for causing serious hurt to Sivapragasam.^[22][23]