SINGAPORE
The Court of Appeal on Tuesday rejected a bid by Malaysian drug trafficker Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam to start judicial review proceedings to challenge his death sentence.
The Straits Times reported that the five-judge court also dismissed Nagaenthran’s request for him to be given time to locate psychiatrists to assess him. Delivering the court’s decision, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon said the case Nagaenthran mounted was “baseless and without merit both as a matter of fact and of law”.
Nagaenthran’s lawyer, Violet Netto, had argued on March 1 that the 33-year-old was “not competent” to be executed, claiming he was mentally disabled. Chief Justice Menon said there was no admissible evidence showing any decline in Nagaenthran’s mental condition.
The only evidence was a “self-serving” affidavit by Nagaenthran’s former lawyer M. Ravi, in which he speculated that the inmate had the mental age of a person under the age of 18.
The Chief Justice added that the way the case has been conducted showed that it was a “stopgap measure” devised by Nagaenthran and his lawyers to try to delay the execution.The Malaysian was arrested in 2009 at the age of 21 with heroin strapped to his thigh. He was convicted of trafficking 42.72g of heroin in 2010 and given the mandatory death penalty. His appeal against conviction and sentence were dismissed in 2011.
In 2017, the High Court found that he did not qualify to be given life imprisonment, after considering the evidence from four psychological and psychiatric experts. Nagaenthran’s case came under the spotlight in October last year after a letter from the Singapore Prison Service to his mother in Ipoh, informing her that the death sentence would be carried out on Nov 10, was circulated on social media. In an eleventh-hour bid to halt the execution, his former lawyer Ravi contended that, based on his opinion, Nagaenthran had the “mental age” of a person below 18 years old. The bid for permission to start judicial review proceedings to challenge his death sentence was dismissed by the High Court. He then appealed to the Court of Appeal.
