KETIDAKTAHUAN HUKUM SEBAGAI UNSUR KESALAHAN DALAM PUTUSAN HAKIM (STUDI KASUS PUTUSAN NOMOR 286/PID.SUS/2024/PN MLG)

This research arises from the fundamental tension between the principle of legal certainty that dominates Indonesia’s criminal justice system and the substantive justice required to protect marginalized communities who lack adequate access to legal information and literacy. The case of Piyono a 61-year-old small-scale fish seller convicted for keeping five alligator gars classified as prohibited species serves as an empirical lens to examine how courts conceptualize legal ignorance as an element of culpability (schuld). Although the material act (actus reus) was undisputed, the case exposes a critical question: can the state legitimately punish individuals for violating laws that were never meaningfully communicated, disseminated, or made accessible to them. Using a normative juridical method supported by conceptual, doctrinal, and jurisprudential analysis, this study draws upon court decisions, statutory regulations, classical and contemporary criminal law scholarship, and prior research on restorative justice, legal positivism, and structural legal inequality. Ius Transeducativum a transformative-educative legal theory developed in this thesis serves as the analytical framework for evaluating the adequacy of judicial reasoning and the future direction of criminal law reform.
The findings reveal that the judicial reasoning in Decision No. 286/Pid.Sus/2024/PN Mlg remains anchored in a positivistic and retributive paradigm. The doctrine of ignorantia legis non excusat is applied rigidly without assessing whether the defendant’s ignorance constituted an invincible error. Critical contextual factors age, socio-economic condition, limited education, absence of regulatory outreach, and lack of mens rea were not incorporated into the assessment of culpability. As a consequence, formal justice prevailed over substantive justice, thereby undermining the constitutional mandate of Article 28D(1) of the 1945 Constitution. The research concludes that such punishment is not only disproportionate, but also ignores the educative function of law and risks perpetuating systemic injustice against legally illiterate communities. Through the lens of Ius Transeducativum, this study constructs an alternative judicial model that treats criminal punishment as an instrument of education and social transformation rather than mere retribution. The study recommends the adoption of educative sanctions, the institutionalization of legal literacy as a prerequisite for punishment, reforms to national sentencing guidelines, and the repositioning of judges as agents of legal enlightenment. These findings contribute theoretically to the expansion of progressive legal discourse and practically to the development of a more humane, contextual, and constitutionally grounded criminal justice policy.