Debate between Constitutional Court justices at a meeting last March seemed to always end in I Dewa Gede Palguna's 'defeat'. Five justices backed the position of Constitutional Court Chief Justice Arief Hidayat, while Palguna's view was supported by justices Aswanto and Muhammad Alim.

AMID a busy schedule involving the trials for about 4,000 cases, three chief justices attended a hearing at the Constitutional Court on Thursday two weeks ago. They did not occupy the seats of the panel of justices. Instead, as observer attendees, they spent the 45-minute session sitting in the row of applicants for a judicial review, right in front of the seats of the panel of constitutional justices.

Dozens of prison guards combed the Salemba Detention House in Central Jakarta, in the wee hours of last Tuesday. As inmates slept, the guards checked the interior of every block, and then scoured the penitentiary mosque and church. But, not all the prisoners were asleep.

Four cells at the end of the hallway of the National Narcotics Agency (BNN)'s detention center are now empty. The rooms, each measuring 30 square meters, are sealed off with police tape. Iron bars block access to the cells and separate them from the other eight cells. Down the hallway, at the bottom of an iron ventilation grille panel, is a gaping hole the size of a 21-inch TV screen. Right above is an active CCTV camera.

PRESSED for time, the seven Judicial Commission (KY) commissioners, physically separated by over 1,000 kilometers, used a BlackBerry chat group to form a judge's panel on March 11. On that day, several commissioners were in Bali. Others were in Jakarta. As soon as the group was formed, the panel got to work gathering witness statements and other evidence needed to prove a suspected violation of the ethics by an unnamed Supreme Court justice. "We were certainly in a race against time," the Judicial Commission chair for inter-institutional relations, Imam Anshori Saleh, said in his office last Tuesday.