At the end of the trial, the High Court acquitted Gobi of the original charge after accepting his defence and account.
Although Gobi lost his bid for a stay of execution in February 2020, he was eventually successful in persuading the Court of Appeal in October 2020 to re-open his case in light of a 2019 landmark case ruling, and he subsequently has his death sentence commuted to his original sentence of 15 years' imprisonment and ten strokes of the cane, thus enabling him to escape the death penalty a second time.
As he was burdened with the expensive hospital bills since his salary as a security guard was very low and could not afford the medical fees, he was asked by two friends "Vinod" and "Guru" to transport drugs to Singapore.
According to Gobi after his arrest and on his trial, he was paid RM500 to transport each bag of "chocolate drugs" from Malaysia to Singapore.
However, after crossing the border into Singapore, he was arrested at the Woodlands Checkpoint when he was approached and searched by the officers, who discovered the drugs.
In view of the discovery, Gobi was charged with capital drug trafficking, a crime which attracts the death penalty in Singapore if found guilty, unless Gobi could prove that he either acted as a mere courier or suffering from a mental illness (which might warrant life imprisonment instead if fulfilled).
[6] At the end of the trial on 15 May 2017, the High Court's judge Lee Seiu Kin accepted that he did not know the bundles he was carrying contained heroin, and ruled that he should not be held liable for the capital charge, which required the conditions of the "presumption of knowledge of drugs" and "wilfull blindness" to prove a drug trafficker guilty.
As such, Justice Lee convicted Gobi of a lesser charge of attempted trafficking of a Class C drug (which refers to drugs that did not attract the death penalty), and sentenced him to 15 years' imprisonment and ten strokes of the cane, and backdate Gobi's sentence to the date of his arrest.
[8] Since Gobi was not certified to have assisted the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) in a substantive way, and did not suffer from diminished responsibility, he was ineligible for the alternative penalty of life imprisonment.
[18] The Attorney-General's Chambers (AGC) subsequently filed for correction orders under POFMA towards Malaysian human rights group Lawyers for Liberty for spreading the above misinformation of illegal execution methods, and they described these allegations as "baseless" and "untrue".
In this ruling, the Court of Appeal held that the legal concept of wilful blindness is irrelevant in considering whether the presumption of possession under Section 18(2) of the MDA has been rebutted, which resulted in Adili's acquittal.
After reviewing the case, the five judges hearing the appeal - Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon and four Judges of Appeal Judith Prakash, Tay Yong Kwang, Andrew Phang and Steven Chong - decided that Gobi's failure to rebut the presumption of knowledge could no longer become the foundation of his conviction on the capital charge.
[32][33] After his second acquittal, Gobi filed a lawsuit against the prosecutors who prosecuted him in the original trial, claiming that the prosecution had "abused their powers and acted in bad faith by improperly performing a legal act which resulted in harm to the plaintiff", and have "breached their fundamental duties to assist in the administration of justice",[34] but it was dismissed on 15 April 2021, based on the baseless and "entirely without merit" claims Gobi made in his lawsuit.
[37] The disciplinary tribunal later dismissed a misconduct charge against Ravi as they find him making a contextually fair criticism of the prosecution's inconsistency between both their respective cases in Gobi's trial and their 2018 appeal, as attributed to the absence of the "Adili" landmark ruling in the previous court proceedings before Gobi's second acquittal, but the tribunal still made out a misconduct charge against Ravi since he claimed that the prosecution in charge of Gobi's case were the "wrongdoers" in his 2020 comments.
[40][41][42] Gobi and twelve of the other death row prisoners continued to bring the matter forward to the Court of Appeal, before Ravi withdrew the entire application.