The ruling was read out on Tuesday in a 3-to-2 decision.

Two dissenting justices said, “the court should uphold the death penalty for Ferdy”, Sobandi told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

In the cassation case, prosecutors from the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) filed motions in opposition to appeals by Ferdy, who had lost the case at the Jakarta High Court.

Ferdy was found guilty by the South Jakarta District Court in April of the premeditated murder of Yosua, a police brigadier, and of tampering with evidence to orchestrate a cover-up, and was sentenced to death. The sentence was much harsher than the life in prison demanded by prosecutors for Ferdy as the principal perpetrator.

Ferdy shot Yosua in the head after he ordered another aide-de-camp, Second Agent Richard Eliezer, to shoot the victim in Ferdy’s residence in Jakarta in July of last year, the lower court judges found. The former National Police internal affairs chief then attempted to make the death look like the result of a shootout between his two aides-de-camp. The judges found that Ferdy also enlisted the help of two accomplices: private chauffeur Kuat Ma’ruf and another aide-de-camp Ricky Rizal, an enlisted officer who ranked below Yosua.

Ferdy appealed to the Jakarta High Court in May of this year, but the high court upheld the conviction and death sentence.

Among the bench's considerations at the time were the fact that Ferdy had never admitted to masterminding Yosua’s murder and that he had stuck to his claim that Yosua had assaulted his wife, Putri Chandrawathi, which stood in contrast to the evidence presented by prosecutors during court proceedings. The appellate bench also said Ferdy’s death sentence, the first case in decades in which a police general has been given such a harsh sentence, served as a deterrent and set a precedent that no one was above the law.

Yosua’s murder case was the biggest scandal to hit the National Police in recent memory and gripped the nation for months.

The same lower court in April of this year also sentenced Putri and the two other accomplices to 20, 15 and 13 years in prison, respectively, all beyond the sentencing demands of prosecutors.

The appeals against the lower court rulings at the Jakarta High Court were not successful, but the Supreme Court on Tuesday reduced their sentences to between 10 and 8 years in prison.

Meanwhile, despite having shot the victim after being told to do so by his commanding officer and his involvement in the attempted cover-up, Richard received only 18 months in prison, a much lighter sentence than the 12 years sought by prosecutors. This was because he agreed to cooperate with authorities to shed light on the case.

Richard did not appeal the ruling.

Yosua’s murder case caused public trust in the National Police to plummet, opinion surveys showed at the time, while also sparking calls for police reform.

But a survey by Indikator Politik Indonesia suggests that the police’s reputation has begun to recover, with 68.4 percent of respondents saying they trusted the institution in February, higher than the 58 percent who answered the same way in November of last year, during Ferdy’s trial. (ipa)