Who is Josephus Tan, the lawyer who represented Megan Khung's mother pro bono?

There's a phrase that lawyer Josephus Tan repeats several times over the course of our two-hour interview.

It's this: "Hurt people hurt people."

It's why over the course of his career, he has defended many of Singapore's most depraved, violent criminals, from murderers to animal abusers.

"In my line of work — I've been a criminal defence lawyer for close to 20 years — I've seen one commonality," the 46-year-old says.

"If you trace back all the way to their childhood, their formative years, they were themselves victims."

The managing director of Invictus Law Corporation, who came from an impoverished background and was himself involved in gang violence when he was younger, says that he believes in giving the underprivileged a voice — even when they make poor decisions.

He quotes his mentor, the late criminal defence lawyer Subhas Anandan, as having once said: "Even the most heinous offender deserves a proper trial."

"You are the last voice for them," Tan says.

"It's very easy for people to read in the papers, to point fingers, to be judgmental. I think that is the easier route.

The difficult route will be to really get down to the details, get into the roots of the problem and understand why it happened.

There's no excuse for what they did.

But it doesn't always mean that because someone committed a crime, they're inherently evil."

Foo Li Ping

Tan has been the defence counsel for a number of high-profile cases, including the torture and killing of an intellectually disabled woman, Annie Ee, in 2017.

But the most recent was the trial of Foo Li Ping, the mother of Megan Khung.

In a case that horrified the nation, Foo was found to have subjected her daughter to 13 months of physical and psychological abuse.

This eventually culminated in Megan's death at just four years old.

Tan and his co-counsel defended Foo pro bono, claiming that she had been in an abusive relationship with her then-boyfriend.

But the judge said that these "do not absolve her of any liability".

In a sit-down interview with Mothership, Tan doesn't shy away from the horror of Foo's crimes.

Neither does he oppose the outpouring of public sentiment, nor the backlash he's received himself for defending Foo.

"My friends and family members, they told me that even an animal wouldn't do that to its own child," he says bluntly.

"I think these are fair statements and fair judgments. There's no excuse for what she did...confronted with the legal facts, we saw a very cruel mother who did that to her own daughter.

But I will still say this. She came from a bad place. She was on drugs throughout the ordeal."

In cases like this, Tan likens himself to a doctor; he treats his patients whether they are good or bad, rich or poor.

As a lawyer, he focuses on the facts, the law, and the principles — not his own emotions.

It's a skill he's struggled to develop.

Over the years, he has faced "the worst of humanity", from a man who threw a cat off a 13th-floor building just because it followed him home, to a man who raped his own mother.

But today, he's confident that there is no case he will reject. No criminal so twisted that he'd refuse them a legal defence.

"We are professionals...we defend our clients legally, but that doesn't mean we stand with them morally," he says.

'Somebody has to do the job'

Tan's story is well-known. In his younger days, the junior criminal lawyer took on so many pro bono cases that he teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

He had a stroke, got divorced, and almost lost his legal licence.

Turning up at the Mothership office in a sharp suit and leather boots, he's clearly come a long way.

Today, pro bono work comprises around 50 per cent of his work, rather than the 80 to 90 per cent in the past, he explains.

But it's enough that he still faces a fair amount of people's "righteous anger", as he puts it.

Tan recalls how on one occasion, after the Annie Ee case, he went to the hawker centre to buy a packet of chicken rice.

"The uncle selling the chicken rice recognised me and shouted, 'I'm not going to sell to you, because you defended that couple. You're just as beastly as them.'"

Even apart from such outbursts, he gets snide remarks and side glances when he goes out in public. Sometimes, even his loved ones question why he does what he does.

'They'll say, why? Why would you defend such a person, so heinous, so bad?"

"So in the initial years I felt misunderstood and discouraged. I'd be like, I thought you knew what I do for a living? Why are you questioning me?"

These days, however, he no longer gets demoralised when people question him.

In fact, he welcomes righteous anger in the face of crime. "It shows that [people] do not accept such behaviour."

Besides, somebody has to "sweep up the sh*t", as he puts it. Even criminals charged for capital offences are entitled to pro bono legal representation, which they are assigned by the courts.

"There will always be people who hate me," Tan tells me.

"Ultimately, somebody has to do the job. Whether you like it or not.

Just be thankful that you're not the one being called to do this."

Second chances

Towards the end of our interview, I ask Tan what his first impression of Foo was.

I admit to having a kind of morbid curiosity about what Foo — a woman who put her young child through such hideous cruelty — is really like.

Tan explains that by the time he met her, she was in remand with no access to drugs.

Forced into sobriety, the "real Foo Li Ping" regularly broke down, never tried to push the blame to anyone else, and seemed genuinely remorseful.

She found a new purpose for life — to reunite with and look after her aged mother.

According to Tan, Foo has also maintained from the start that regardless of the outcome of the case, she would not appeal the decision and accept it "wholeheartedly".

This was even as she was initially slapped with a capital charge, which carries either the death penalty or life imprisonment.

Not every criminal he encounters is entirely remorseful, Tan admits. But Foo is not one of them.

"I still believe in the natural goodness of humans. I feel that apart from rare exceptions, nobody is truly evil," he tells me.

It's a stark statement, coming from someone who's spoken to and defended hundreds of rapists, murderers, abusers. Thieves and cheats and scammers. The worst of humanity, in his own words.

"I can understand [when people are angry]," he says.

"But I do urge members of the public to always exercise compassion. Because I think everybody deserves a second chance."

Top image by Mothership, Foo Li Ping/Instagram, Simonboy/Instagram