Sim Ah Cheoh (沈亚彩 Shěn Yàcăi; c. 1948 – 30 March 1995) was a Singaporean drug trafficker of Chinese descent.

As she was found to have around 12 more months left to live, Sim was granted clemency a second time after she applied to the President of Singapore to pardon her and release her to let her receive treatment and spend the final days of her life with her family and sons outside prison.

Due to extreme poverty, Sim was only educated till primary three in a Chinese-educated school, and she also worked as a servant, and took up part time jobs at 13 years old.

After Sim gave birth to her eldest son, she went to work as a bar hostess and then later became an illegal bookie, but her latter business failed, and she owed around $50,000 to loan sharks, which sent her to further financial trouble.

In the end, the confessions were ruled admissible as evidence by both the trial judges Lai Kew Chai and Joseph Grimberg.

After the prosecutor-in-charge Lee Sing Lit presented his case, the trio were ordered to enter their defence, but they chose to remain silent.

[7] On 29 July 1988, all three accused - Sim Ah Cheoh, Ronald Tan Chong Ngee and Lim Joo Yin - were convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to death by hanging.

In the petition, Sim's lawyer R Palakrishnan stated that his client has led a tragic and poor life, and she has no marketable skills, no schooling, and upkeep from home, and was a housewife and single mother of two sons.

He stated that these life difficulties resulted in Sim's mental weakness, and caused her to be tempted into crime with the desperation to pay off her debts.

She was also the second woman and second drug convict on death row to receive presidential clemency in Singapore after Siti Aminah Jaffar in 1983.

[15][16] Before the landmark appeal by Abdul Nasir Amer Hamsah on 20 August 1997, life imprisonment at the time of Sim's offence, conviction and pardon was considered as a fixed jail term of 20 years, with the possibility of one-third reduction of the sentence for good behaviour.

In early 1995, after she was told that she had at most one year left to live, Sim appealed to President of Singapore Ong Teng Cheong (who succeeded Wee) to be released so that she could spend the final moments of her life with her sons and relatives.

He kept the newspaper clippings of his mother's case and vowed to not go astray; he turned to reading books, listening to songs on the radio and window shopping with his friends to not adopt any ill habits.

The news of his mother's illness, which was given by his school principal, was a huge blow to Sim's younger son, who thought that he may be able to live with her again once she regained her freedom.

Till today, Mathavakannan, who has been released on parole since 2012, remains as the sixth and last death row inmate in Singapore to have been granted clemency.

[27][28][29] Sim's case is once again mentioned more than 30 years later when Malaysian drug trafficker Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam is facing imminent execution in 2021, with many death penalty opponents appealed for mercy on his life based on his low IQ and alleged intellectual disability.