A Singapore court rejected a last-minute petition to postpone the execution of drug trafficker Kalwant Singh, a Malaysian of Indian descent, so he will be hanged early on Thursday. This comes two months after police executed Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, 34, an Indian-Malaysian drug dealer whose attorneys and family filed an appeal claiming he had a mental disability.
Singh, 32, was found guilty of smuggling heroin into the city-state in 2016 and received a hangman’s death sentence. Because he had provided information that assisted in the arrest of a significant suspected drug trafficker, he had requested a review.
The Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network wrote to the Singapore embassy on Singh’s behalf requesting that the execution be put on hold.
It was made clear that Kalwant had received threats of violence and had been made to transfer drugs to Singapore in order to pay back a gambling debt related to football.
For individuals found guilty of trafficking 15 grammes or more of pure heroin, Singapore has a mandatory death penalty. If the defendant functioned solely as a courier and cooperated with police, a court may, nevertheless, commute the punishment to life in prison. According to AFP, one of the co-accused in the case of Kalwant Singh had his sentence reduced after cooperating with the authorities.
An affidavit from the Central Narcotics Bureau, which claimed that no information Singh supplied was used to apprehend the suspect, was used by a three-judge panel to reject Singh’s appeal, nevertheless.
Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon declared, “We deny the application for the stay.”
His family and legal counsel cited his IQ of 69 and the fact that it is against the law to execute someone who is mentally ill under international human rights legislation.
However, law minister K Shanmugham refuted the IQ assertion in a recent BBC interview, stating that the courts had concluded that it was “a intentional, purposeful, calibrated, calculated decision… to bring the pharmaceuticals in.”
