A Malaysian man yesterday became the first convicted drug trafficker to escape the gallows in Singapore following recent legal reforms in the city-state.
Yong Vui Kong, 25, was resentenced to life imprisonment and 15 strokes of the cane under Singapore’s new discretionary death-penalty regime, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Chambers said. Under reforms that took effect this year, Singapore judges are now allowed to spare drug traffickers from execution if they were mere couriers and provided “substantive assistance” to police in the fight against the drug trade.
Prior to the changes, judges had no choice but to impose death by hanging on drug traffickers found to be carrying illegal substances beyond specific limits.
For heroin dealers, anyone found trafficking in more than 15g faced the mandatory death penalty. Yong was found in possession of 47g when he was arrested in 2007.
In a written submission, state prosecutors vouched for Yong’s cooperation in “disrupting drug trafficking activities within and outside Singapore,” while High Court Judge Choo Han Teck yesterday ascertained that he was just a courier.
In a media statement, Yong’s lawyer M. Ravi said that the Malaysian “has seen the error of his ways and has repented.”
“This is the happiest day of my client’s life. He feels intense gratitude towards all those who have worked so hard to save him from being executed,” Ravi said.
Yong, who is from the eastern Malaysian state of Sabah, was only 19 when he was first sentenced to hang in 2008.
Three previous appeals to overturn the judgement were rejected, while an appeal for presidential clemency was also denied. Changes to capital punishment laws were passed in November last year following a year-long review of the mandatory death penalties for murder and drug trafficking, which critics said were too harsh and sweeping.
However, Singapore, widely regarded as one of the world’s safest societies, rejected calls to abolish the death penalty altogether, saying it must be preserved as a deterrent to crime.
The latest official statistics showed that no one was executed last year, and four people were executed in the previous year.
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