[3] Coomaraswamy received his early education at the English College in Johor and later obtained his law degree from the University of Nottingham in England.

[8] His first appointment with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was from January 1970 to July 1973 as Singapore's High Commissioner to India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh.

[16] In 1990, Coomaraswamy was one of the two judges presiding the trial of Chia Chee Yeen, a National Serviceman who was charged with the fatal shooting of his army superior Daniel De Rozario in 1987.

Eleven of the fourteen members involved in the killing stood trial before Coomaraswamy for the charges of rioting and inflicting grievous hurt.

[18] As for the remaining three gang members, they were separately tried for the case and unrelated offences: one of them, the Ang Soon Tong headman Sagar Suppiah Retnam was sentenced to death for murdering Sivapragasam,[19][20] while another was given 17 strokes of the cane and seven years' jail for causing grievous hurt to Sivapragasam,[21][22] and a third named Soosay Sinnappen was jailed nine years for an unrelated case of manslaughter and another sentence of four years with six strokes of the cane for causing serious hurt to Sivapragasam.

[23][24] On 16 July 1993, three months before his tenure as a judge would end, Coomaraswamy sentenced a 32-year-old delivery worker named Bala Kuppusamy to 23 years' imprisonment and 24 strokes of the cane for robbing, sodomizing and raping a 20-year-old student in October 1992, in addition to similar crimes perpetuated against three other females (one of whom was 13 years old).

In fact, Bala was previously convicted of rape in 1985 and was released on parole after serving seven years out of his 11-year jail term, and his crimes took place merely 45 days after he was out of prison.

[25] Bala was granted parole and released in March 2008 after spending 15 years in prison, but he re-offended and attacked seven women, robbing them and even raped or molested about three or four of the victims.