Legal Protection for the Suspect's Wife in Handling Money Laundering Cases: Evidence from the Indonesian National Narcotics Agency

Money laundering is a stand-alone crime, although money laundering is born from its original crime, such as corruption, but the anti-money laundering regime in almost all countries places money laundering as a crime independent of its original crime. In handling narcotics criminal cases, the suspect's wife is sometimes made a suspect in a money laundering crime. Seeing this, clear restrictions are needed in order to achieve legal certainty, legal protection and justice for wives who are determined to be perpetrators of money laundering crimes. This is qualitative research using a statutory approach, case and conceptual approaches. The primary legal materials resulted from relevant laws and legislation. The legal material collected is analysed prescriptively. The results show that there is a difference in treatment of the perpetrator's wife in almost the same narcotics criminal cases, indicating that investigators in money laundering criminal cases do not yet have standard procedures. Hence, the assessment is based on the investigator's subjectivity. As a special crime, the crime of money laundering requires formulating procedural law that is different from ordinary criminal procedural law.