A little over a day before he was set to meet the gallows, Malaysian death row inmate Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam was granted a stay of execution amid persistent questions about his mental capacity.
This afternoon’s hearing to review the drug trafficker’s death sentence came a day after the high court dismissed the 33-year-old’s application to review his sentence owing to his impaired mental ability. If today’s appeal is unsuccessful, the execution may still go as planned tomorrow.
Attorney M Ravi had argued that Nagaenthran’s life be spared considering that he has the mental age of someone under 18, reports said of the closed-door hearing. Justice See Kee Oon countered that the lawyer had not met Nagaenthran enough to make such an assertion.
“Mr Ravi has only met the plaintiff once in the last three years, for a mere 26 minutes in all from 9.20am to 9.46am on Nov 2, 2021,” the judge was quoted saying. Nagaenthran had refused to meet with the lawyer when a request to see him was made in 2019, according to Ravi.
The judge added that while Nagaenthran’s low IQ of 69 was not disputed, the trial judge never found him to be suffering from an intellectual disability when he smuggled a small packet of heroin from Malaysia in 2009.
International campaigners, including the European Union and most recently, Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson, have been putting pressure on Singapore to spare Nagaenthran from the gallows and abolish the death penalty, which many say has not been substantially proven to deter crime. Some 170 member states of the United Nations have either abolished the death penalty or do not impose it.
Ravi wrote online yesterday that he was appealing the high court judge’s decision today.
Public prosecutors also issued a statement to the press yesterday containing an account from a prison officer they said had been monitoring Nagaenthran for several years and deemed him to be normal.
“Nagaenthran has not demonstrated any abnormal behaviour throughout the officer’s interactions with him. He has no problem communicating with [Singapore Prison Service] officers in English, Malay and Tamil, making requests and responding to instructions,” the statement from the Attorney-General’s Chambers said.
Nagaenthran also confirmed he understood the matter of his execution and subsequently started requesting religious counseling, religious songs to be played at his cell, and visits from his family, the public prosecutors said. Nagaenthran also requested his choice of prison officers to attend to him and provided contact numbers for his loved ones, including a childhood friend he had not been in touch with for some time, prosecutors added.
They said that Nagaenthran undergoes regular medical and psychiatric assessments in prison. However, Ravi has objected to the production of the death row prisoner’s latest assessment without stating why.
Yesterday, British business magnate Branson published a statement about Nagaenthran and criticized the death penalty on his blog at Virgin.com.
“Year after year, people face the gallows, the firing squad, or – in Duterte’s Philippines – unaccountable death squads for alleged drug-related crimes,” he wrote. “Yet, the global drug trade continues to grow, and illicit drugs of all types are more readily available around the world than at any other point in history. If deterrence is the objective, these laws have failed miserably.”
Other stories:
EU calls on Singapore to halt drug trafficker’s execution
‘Please don’t force them to bury him,’ families of condemned plea for Nagaenthran’s life
Reader Interactions