People committing a crime must be punished as they did what they did with a sane mind, but why execute a man who has committed things out of his sanity. Here is one case of Singapore where a man named Nagaenthran Dharmalingam is scheduled to be executed for smuggling drugs from Singapore to Malaysia in 2009.
The decision of executing him came even after he was medically assessed that he had an IQ of 69. Her sister said in an interview with BBC that she constantly thinks about his brother and is praying for his well-being. He was going to be sentenced to death on Wednesday morning but he was granted a last-minute stay of execution. The court will decide his fate today.
People with such an IQ level are recognized as having an intellectual disability according to experts. But the Singapore government believe otherwise stating that he clearly understood what he was doing and didn’t lose his sense of judgement of what was right and what was wrong.
If this execution is passed by the court, it will be one of the first executions in Singapore since 2019. Singapore is known for its tough drug laws and locally, the death penalty is not under any controversy but this case has caught global attention and the case is heated up like never before. People are angry to see this sort of injustice.
More than 60,000 people have signed a petition requesting Singapore’s president to pardon Nagaenthran as executing a mentally ill person is against international human rights law. The movement has gone viral on social media where more and more people are expressing their anger and sympathy towards Nagaenthran and his family.
In 2009, Nagaenthran was caught with 43g of heroin while crossing to Singapore from Malaysia. Under the laws of Singapore, people caught with more than 15g of heroin are subject to the death penalty.
Initially, in his trial, he said he was coerced into carrying those drugs but later he confessed that he did it to get some money. The court stated that his initial story was ‘fabricated’. Hence, he was sentenced to the death penalty. In 2015, he appealed to the court to give him life in prison as he suffered from intellectual disability, this was confirmed by Dr Ken Ung in 2017 that he suffered from mild intellectual disability and it could cloud his judgement of right and wrong.
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