Mohamed Shalleh bin Abdul Latiff (1984 – 3 August 2023) was a Singaporean delivery driver who was found guilty and sentenced to death in January 2019 for one count of trafficking 54.04g of diamorphine.
[1] However, the trial judge Hoo Sheau Peng rejected Mohamed Shalleh's claim and therefore sentenced him to the mandatory death penalty for diamorphine trafficking.
Prior to his arrest in 2016 for drug trafficking, Mohamed Shalleh was working as a freelance delivery driver (starting from 2015) and earned a monthly income of SGD$2,800.
Earlier that day, Mohamed Shalleh paid a Malaysian man SGD$7,000 after he received three bundles of diamorphine and an orange plastic bag containing two packets of methamphetamine through the arrangement of a friend.
[7][8] On 28 January 2019, after a seven-day trial, High Court judge Hoo Sheau Peng found Mohamed Shalleh guilty of diamorphine trafficking and sentenced him to death.
[14][15] However, the High Court rejected these allegations and called the lawsuit as an abuse of process and "plainly unsustainable and unmeritorious", and it found that there were likely some "perfectly valid and legitimate reasons" why lawyers did not agree to represent these inmates outside of the costs orders, and hence, it found no tangible evidence to back the claims that lawyers were threatened by the court penalties to not take up these cases and argue the appeals that contained no merit.
[18][19] Just a day after the appeal, one of Mohamed Shalleh's fellow plaintiffs, Abdul Rahim Shapiee, was put to death alongside his co-accused Ong Seow Ping (who was not involved in the lawsuit) for diamorphine trafficking.
[20][21] On 28 July 2023, it was reported by the media that 39-year-old Mohamed Shalleh bin Abdul Latiff, who by then was incarcerated on death row for four years, was scheduled to hang on 3 August 2023.
[37] Human Rights Watch also criticized the upcoming hanging of Mohamed Shalleh (as well as the recent executions of Saridewi and another drug trafficker Mohd Aziz Hussain), stating that the death penalty is "an inherently cruel and unusual punishment" that should be abolished.
[44] Even so, a huge majority of the public remains supportive of the death penalty in spite of the international criticism faced by Singapore for the execution of Mohamed Shalleh, as well as the hangings of both Saridewi binte Djamani and Mohd Aziz bin Hussain during the previous month of July.
It was further updated that as of the week after Mohamed Shalleh's execution, there were fifty people held on death row in Singapore, three for murder and the rest for drug trafficking.