Capital punishment in Singapore

[4] The most recent execution conducted in Singapore took place on 07 February 2025, when "a 50 year old Singaporean who was convicted of having in his possession controlled drugs for the purpose of trafficking" was hanged.

In 2010, the law was amended to allow judges to mete out life imprisonment to offenders convicted of capital offences, but aged below 18 at the time of their crimes.

These offenders can be sentenced to another form of indefinite detention under TPP, being detained at medical facilities, prisons or at some other safe places in custody, and subject to psychiatric review of their mental conditions until suitable for release.

In November 1995, one Poh Kay Keong had his conviction overturned after the court found that his statement to a Central Narcotics Bureau officer had been made under duress.

[30] In November 2012, capital punishment laws in Singapore were revised such that the mandatory death penalty for those convicted of drug trafficking or murder was lifted under certain specific conditions.

Judges in Singapore were given a discretion to impose a sentence of life imprisonment with mandatory caning for offenders who commit murder but had no intention to kill, which come under Sections 300(b), 300(c) and 300(d) of the Penal Code.

[32][33] Abdul Haleem's accomplice, Muhammad Ridzuan bin Md Ali, on the other hand, was sentenced to death for drug trafficking and later hanged on 19 May 2017.

[87] In 1993, a Central Narcotics Bureau officer stated that the drug traffickers they targeted could be graded into two broad categories: Singaporeans and Malaysians supplying the local market, and foreigners only transiting through Singapore while on the way to North America and Europe.

[92] A 1978 newspaper article described the death row section of the original Changi Prison as consisting of 24 cells arranged in a horse shoe shaped block around an open air grassy exercise yard.

[97] Public debate in the Singaporean news media on the death penalty is almost non-existent, although the topic is occasionally discussed in the midst of highly publicised criminal cases.

[citation needed] Efforts to garner public opinion on the issue are rare, although it has been suggested that the population is influenced by a legalist philosophy which holds that harsh punishment deters crime and helps maintain social peace and harmony.

[98] In October 2007, Senior Minister of State for Law and Home Affairs Ho Peng Kee said in Parliament that "Certain of us may hold the view that the death penalty should be abolished.

In the case of Annie Ee Yu Lian who was abused and murdered by her two friends, some Singaporeans were angered at the cruelty displayed by the offenders and felt that the sentences (which were between 14 and 16 years) for grievous hurt were too light, which prompted them to petition for harsher punishments; some even demanded for the death penalty to be imposed on the couple.

[115][117] After the hanging of Australian citizen Van Tuong Nguyen on 2 December 2005, Susan Chia, province leader of the Good Shepherd Sisters in Singapore, declared that "the death penalty is cruel, inhumane and it violates the right to life."

For example, science fiction author William Gibson, while a journalist, wrote a travel piece on Singapore that he sarcastically titled "Disneyland with the Death Penalty".

[120] The main criticism of the book asserted that wealthy, often well-connected foreigners, could expect leniency from law enforcement, while the poor and disenfranchised were in effect "summarily executed".

[121] Shadrake's book [122] highlighted the contrasting fortunes of German citizen Julia Suzanne Bohl, who ran a major drug ring catering to well off professionals and was herself caught with a capital amount (over 500 grams) of cannabis when police raided her apartment,[123] to Singaporean drug addict Yen May Woen who was caught in possession of 30 grams of low quality heroin.

[132] In March 2022, when Singapore dismissed the final appeal of Malaysian death row prisoner Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam and later authorized the execution of Singaporean drug convict Abdul Kahar Othman, which was its first execution during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 400 Singaporeans, including rights activists Jolovan Wham, Kirsten Han and Kokila Annamalai, who took part in a protest against the government's use of the death penalty at Hong Lim Park.

He cited the statistics of the rate of firearms-related offences and kidnapping cases had dropped dramatically after the introduction of the death penalty as evidence of its deterrence.

The government conducted surveys on Singaporeans and non-Singaporeans, and the majority of both groups responded that the death penalty is more effective than life imprisonment in discouraging people from committing capital offences.

[149][150] In 2012, a number of American elected officials and office-seekers suggested that Singapore's success in combating drug abuse should be examined as a model for the United States.

Former presidential candidate Newt Gingrich repeated his longstanding advocacy for Singaporean methods in the United States' War on Drugs during campaign interviews and speeches.

[152] The following table of executions was compiled by Amnesty International from several sources, including statistics supplied by the Ministry of Home Affairs in January 2001 and government figures reported to Agence France-Presse in September 2003.

Similarly between January and October 2021, no new execution dates were set for the inmates on Singapore's death row, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and resurgence of community cases.

[196][197] On 16 May 2023, three weeks after Tangaraju was put to death, 37-year-old Muhammad Faizal Mohd Shariff, a Singaporean who was found guilty in 2019 of trafficking 1.5 kg of marijuana was reported to have lost his final appeal to commute his sentence.

[204] The 56-year-old male drug offender Mohd Aziz Hussain, as well as Saridewi, were both hanged as scheduled, becoming the third and fourth persons respectively to be executed in Singapore in the year of 2023.

[205][206][207] On 3 August 2023, Singapore carried out the hanging of Mohamed Shalleh Abdul Latiff, a 39-year-old Singaporean and former delivery driver found guilty of trafficking 54.04g of diamorphine in 2016.

These inmates come from a diverse range of countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, China, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam.

[212] In 2016, Singaporean director Boo Junfeng directed and released a film titled Apprentice, starring Firdaus Rahman and Wan Hanafi Su.

The director also revealed that he had gathered information through interviews of the retired executioners, imams and priests who counselled the death row inmates, and also the families of the executed prisoners while producing the film.