HE was convicted. The court said he was guilty. So why is he still free?
The case of Rosmaini Abdul Raof, 43, raises uncomfortable questions about what justice actually looks like when the law presses pause.
Jahidah Nordin, 48, has been bedridden since May 2021. She has not left a hospital bed under her own strength. She carried a child through a coma, delivered him by caesarean section and today that boy holds a disabled person's card because of the developmental toll of what happened before he was even born.
The man responsible for that, convicted of it and sentenced to 10 years for it — is not in prison.
He is out on bail. He is reporting to a police station once a month. And if the latest allegations are to be believed, he has since married again and beaten that wife too, badly enough to hospitalise her and end her pregnancy at 12 weeks.
This is not a failure of the verdict. On Dec 9, 2024, The Johor Bahru Sessions Court found Rosmaini guilty. The High Court upheld that conviction on Nov 4, last year. The sentence exists. The system, in that narrow sense, worked.
What the system also did — routinely, in language most Malaysians will never fully understand — was press pause.
The mechanism nobody talks about
A stay of execution pending appeal is not unusual. It is not controversial in legal circles. It is, in fact, a standard feature of the Malaysian court system — a safeguard that exists to protect the innocent from serving time for convictions that a higher court might later overturn.
The logic is sound enough on paper. If a person is wrongly convicted and sent straight to prison, no appeal victory two years later gives them back the time already lost. The stay is the system's way of acknowledging that lower courts can be wrong and that the consequences of being wrong in criminal matters are irreversible.
Lawyers will tell you this is how it should work. Constitutional experts will tell you the right of appeal means little if the sentence runs out before the appeal is heard. They are not wrong.
But law and justice are not always the same thing. And in the case of Rosmaini, the gap between the two is a woman in a hospital bed in Kedah with fractures to her hand, bruising on her face and a miscarriage she did not ask for.
What the stay actually meant in practice
When the Sessions Court sentenced Rosmaini to 10 years in prison, he did not go to prison. He applied for a stay of execution, it was granted and he went home.
When the High Court upheld that sentence, he applied again. Again it was granted. His bail conditions were tightened — the surety raised, the reporting requirements maintained, the prohibition on contacting Jahidah and the witnesses kept in place.
But he remained free. Out in the community. Able to remarry. Able, according to the latest allegations, to do again what a court has already found he did once.
The question is not whether the stay of execution is legal. It plainly is. The question is whether the conditions attached to it were adequate — and whether anyone in the system stopped to ask what the risk looked like for the women in his life while the appeals played out.
The conditions were not nothing. But were they enough?
To be fair to the court, a stay does not come without conditions. Rosmaini's bail was increased. He had to report to police regularly. He could not contact the victim or prosecution witnesses.
What he was not prohibited from doing was marrying again. Living with a new partner. Having authority over a new household. None of those things are within the court's power to restrict under a standard stay and it would be extraordinary to suggest they should be. Courts do not convict people of crimes they have not yet committed.
But domestic violence does not announce itself. It does not file paperwork and a man convicted of beating his pregnant wife into a coma is not, by any reasonable reading, a low-risk individual to the women around him.
The Domestic Violence Act 1994 allows for protection orders. The criminal courts have conditions they can impose. The question of whether those tools were used as aggressively as the facts of this case demanded is one that deserves a proper answer — not from advocates, but from the institutions involved.
Jahidah is still waiting
There is something devastating about the timeline of this case. Jahidah was beaten in May 2021. Her attacker was convicted in December 2024 three and a half years later. The High Court upheld that conviction in November 2025. The Court of Appeal has yet to hear the matter.
At every stage, the law has moved at the pace the law moves. At every stage, Rosmaini has remained free.
Jahidah, meanwhile, has remained bedridden.
Her sister Fauziah said it plainly on Facebook when the new allegations emerged. "First it was my sister. Then you ran. My sister is in a coma to this day, still bedridden. You're out there comfortable, married again, beating again."
There is no legal argument to make against Fauziah's words. There is no procedural response. There is only the fact that she is right and that the system she is describing — a system that convicted the man who did this, upheld that conviction and then allowed him to remain free long enough to allegedly do it again — is a system that has some serious accounting to do.
The stay is not the villain here. But it is part of the story.
Abolishing stays of execution would cause real harm. Wrongful convictions exist. Appeals courts exist for a good reason. The presumption that a lower court's verdict is final would be its own injustice.
But Rosmaini's case is a reminder that legal mechanisms designed to protect individuals can, in specific circumstances, create conditions where further harm becomes possible. That is not an argument against the mechanism. It is an argument for taking its application seriously — for asking, in cases involving convicted violent offenders, what safeguards exist not just for the accused but for everyone else.
Jahidah did not get a stay. Her injuries did not pause while the courts deliberated. Her son was born into a world already shaped by what the law was still trying to catch up with.
The Court of Appeal will hear this case. It will make its decision in time. The law will continue to move at the pace the law moves.
The only question worth sitting with, in the meantime, is whether that pace is good enough and for whom.