[2011] 7 MLJ A B C D E F G H I Public Prosecutor v Muhammad Rasid bin Hashim (Abang Iskandar J) 873 after he had arrived at KL Sentral, he had rummaged his trousers’ pocket and found the purse and the handphone that he had taken away from the room. At that point of time too, he said he also discovered a chain of keys in his pocket and which he believed he had inadvertently taken away from the room when he took away the purse and the handphone belonging to the accused. According to the accused when he was arrested by the police in Perak a few days later, the police had seized the said bunch of keys as well from him. [40] That, according to the accused was what had actually happened in this case. He was charged for having committed the offences of rape and murder of the deceased as per the charges P11 and P2 respectively. Just to recap, on the maximum evaluation of the evidence so far adduced by the prosecution in this case, this court was of the considered opinion that the statutory threshold of a prima facie case has been established against the accused person on the charges preferred against him. This court had ruled that the prosecution had established a prima facie case against him for both the said charges, which if unrebutted, would warrant his conviction on one or both of the charges. [41] As such, the onus was then on the accused to rebut the prosecution’s case. In a case involving both the charges such as those which this accused was facing before this court, where there was no presumption operating against him, he would need only to raise a reasonable doubt in the prosecution’s case in order to secure an acquittal from the charges. In the celebrated case of Mat v Public Prosecutor [1963] MLJ 263 Justice Suffian J (as he then was) has clearly outlined the proper approach which a criminal trial judge would have to undertake in the management of his case when appreciating the evidence and before coming to the appropriate decision at the appropriate stage in the course of a criminal proceedings. The ‘formula’ has since been followed by our trial judges hearing criminal cases from the magistrate’s courts right up to the High Courts. Now, having said that, a reasonable doubt is not synonymous with just any fanciful or any whimsical doubt. Rather, it is kind of a doubt as relates to the guilt of the accused person which lingers on in the mind of a reasonable person. Indeed, as was opined by Lord Denning J (as he then was) in the case of Miller v Minister of Pensions [1947] 2 All ER 372, ‘The law would fail to protect the community if it admitted fanciful possibilities to deflect the course of justice.’ (Emphasis added.) As to who is the reasonable man has been identified in 1939 in the case of Ghulam Mustafa Gahno v Emperor AIR 1939 Sind 182 as follows: ‘The reasonable man, always an ideal figure, is not a man of identical habits, manners and feelings, wherever he may be. The reasonable man is the normal man of the same class or community as that to which the accused belongs.’ [42] So, the question that needed to be answered by this court at this stage has been two-fold. One is whether the accused had led evidence in order to