Drug smuggling death penalty a deterrent - Singapore
Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam says he has no doubts about the country’s policy.
Singapore’s Minister for Home Affairs and Law has told the BBC he does not have any doubts about the country’s mandatory death penalty for drug traffickers.
“Capital punishment is one aspect of a whole series of measures that we have to deal with drug abuse problems,” K. Shanmugam told HARDtalk’s Stephen Sackur.
“It’s imposed on drug traffickers, and it’s imposed because there’s clear evidence that it’s a serious deterrence for would-be drug traffickers.”
Asked about the recent execution of a man who had spent more than 10 years on death row after being caught bringing the equivalent of three tablespoons of heroin into Singapore, Minister Shanmugam said “ the courts found that he had the working of a criminal mind, and he made a deliberate, purposeful, calibrated, calculated decision to make money, to bring the drugs in”.
Malaysian citizen Nagaenthran Dharmalingam had been assessed by a medical expert to have had an IQ of 69 - a level recognised as indicating an intellectual disability.
His defence team had argued his sentence should be commuted to life and his case attracted international attention.
The minister said that that a psychiatrist called by the defence agreed that he was not intellectually disabled.
Singapore has some of the toughest drug laws in the world with those caught carrying more than 15g of heroin subject to the death penalty.
