A Singaporean court yesterday put the execution of a Malaysian man in a drug trafficking case on hold after a last-ditch legal challenge, his lawyer said, following criticism from campaigners who say he is mentally disabled.
Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam was arrested in 2009 for carrying 43g — about 3 tablespoons — of heroin into the city-state, which has some of the world’s toughest anti-drugs laws.
He was sentenced to death the following year and was due to be hanged tomorrow after losing several appeals, despite supporters’ claims his intellectual disability means he cannot make rational decisions.
Photo: AFP
However, the Singapore High Court yesterday agreed to postpone the execution pending a new appeal from his lawyers, who are arguing that the hanging would be unconstitutional.
“Good news,” Nagaenthran’s lawyer, M. Ravi, wrote on Facebook, alongside the hashtags #End
CrimeNotLife and #DivineJustice.
The case is now to head to the Court of Appeal for further hearings. It was not immediately clear how long the execution would be halted.
Rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have labeled the planned execution “despicable” and “cruel,” while the EU at the weekend urged the city-state to commute the sentence.
More than 200 family members and friends of prisoners who have lived on death row in Singapore have also called for Nagaenthran to be spared, and for the death penalty to be abolished.
“There are no words to describe the pain of having a loved one on death row. Perhaps that is why we don’t often speak of it, and our suffering goes unnoticed,” they wrote in an open letter published by the Transformative Justice Collective.
“Nagen’s family has been unable to visit him for two years, during the pandemic border closure, and with two weeks’ notice that their worst nightmare has arrived, they have to scramble to see him through a glass wall for just a few days before the date of execution,” they said.
Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob wrote to his Singapore counterpart urging the execution to be postponed on “humanitarian grounds,” reports said.
If it goes ahead, it will the first hanging since 2019 in Singapore, which defends its use of capital punishment as an effective deterrent against crime, in spite of mounting calls for its abolition.
Supporters say Nagaenthran has an IQ of 69, a level recognized as an intellectual disability, and was struggling with an alcohol problem at the time of the crime.
However, the Singaporean Ministry of Home Affairs has said that the legal rulings had found he “knew what he was doing” at the time of the offense.
Additional reporting by the Guardian
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