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
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS