The chapter describes how the legislator discussed whether to incorporate a leniency programme in the Trade Competition Act of 2017 (2017 Act). It is argued that there was an initial desire to introduce a leniency programme. The leniency programme would be applied to the criminal sanctions that the bill prescribed for hard-core cartels, such as those involved in price fixing or bid rigging. However, the Office of the Attorney General objected with reasons that giving immunity from a sanction is the constitutional prerogative of the court. In order not to jeopardise the creation of a leniency programme, the drafting committee was willing to limit the lenient treatment to just a reduction in the sanction or to the cartels for which only an administrative sanction would apply. But these initiatives were not incorporated into the 2017 Act. Instead, the 2017 Act gave tremendous flexibility to the enforcement agency by only prescribing maximum sanctions. This might allow a similar result to a leniency programme to be achieved, albeit without a well-defined formal framework.

The Indonesian criminal justice system finds itself under considerable pressure. Heavy caseloads and backlogs have become a central issue for the Indonesian prosecution service. Pretrial detention and prison sentences lead to overcrowding of prisons. Recent research moreover found that most of the backlog of cases in the Supreme Court are appeals of criminal cases filed by prosecutors. This makes case management highly important given that theoretically, the prosecutor’s discretion has a significant role as a criminal case filter. However, since the 1960s, when Suharto’s regimes started using the public prosecution as its instrument for political stability, public prosecutors perform as administrators rather than as officials exercising discretion with caution and care. By adopting a socio-legal approach, I explain the prosecutors’ way of thinking and their influence on how discretion is exercised. This study investigates the implications of the public prosecutions bureaucratic culture on the managing of criminal caseloads in Indonesia and demonstrates why the public prosecutor misuses the appellate procedures in the hopes of gaining success on the court. This chapter offers important insight into prosecutors as the justice system postman in Indonesia.