Photo: Yong Vui Kong’s brothers Yong Yun Leong (left) and Yong Yun Chung (centre) leaving the High Court with lawyer M. Ravi in 2011, AFP
Drug couriers Yong Vui Kong and Subashkaran Pragasam may be among the first drug traffickers convicted in Singapore to have their death sentences reduced.
On Sept. 18, the Attorney-General’s Chambers revealed prosecutors would certify in court that the two had “substantively assisted the Central Narcotics Bureau in disrupting drug trafficking activities within and outside Singapore”.
This means that instead of the death penalty, Kong and Subashkaran may instead face life sentences and at least 15 strokes of the cane.
This follows landmark changes made to Singapore’s death penalty regime, which was relaxed in January to depict a new set of sentencing guidelines for lower-level drug trafficking. According to The Wall Street Journal, the revisions were implemented in part to encourage couriers to spill information to authorities to assist in nailing higher-level drug traffickers.
24-year-old Malaysian Yong was arrested in 2008 with 47.27g of heroin, while Subashkaran, a Singaporean, had been caught with at least 186.62g in the same year. Under the old Singapore law, anyone convicted of trafficking more than 15g of heroin was sentenced to death by hanging.
Yong’s case in particular, received extensive public attention when he was convicted in 2011 — family members and anti-death penalty activists from both Singapore and Malaysia had campaigned against the decision while his lawyer M. Ravi continued to file appeals to then president S. R. Nathan.
The relaxed death penalty guidelines were first applied in April this year, when prosecutors qualified 29-year-old drug trafficker Abdul Haleem Abdul Kareem for a lighter sentence in response to his contributions towards anti-narcotics efforts.
