Virgin Group founder and billionaire Richard Branson and Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob had joined rights groups in calling for the prisoner to be spared capital punishment because of his IQ of 69.
However,on Tuesday a five-judge panel in Singapore’s top court,the Court of Appeal,rejected Nagaenthran’s bid and an attempt by his legal team to seek an independent psychiatric assessment.
Singapore takes a notoriously hard line on the importation of narcotics but it has not carried out a death penalty since 2019,when four prisoners were executed.
The family of another death row inmate at Changi Prison,Abdul Kahar bin Othman,received notice that he was scheduled to be hanged on Wednesday,according to the Transformative Justice Collective. The 68-year-old was convicted in 2013 of trafficking 66.77 grams of diamorphine to Singapore.
Singaporean courts had previously dismissed efforts by Nagaenthran’s lawyers to commute his sentence due to a mental disability,disputing the extent of his impairment and arguing he had been well aware he was committing a serious crime when he tried to cross the border from Malaysia with the drugs in a bundle strapped to his thigh.
Nagaenthran’s team submitted a new medical report by Australian consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Danny Sullivan,executive director of clinical services at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health,to support its claim that his life be spared. Sullivan,in his report,requested the court “reconsiders the death penalty as appropriate for a man with borderline intellectual functioning which was likely to have been causally associated with his offending”.
However,the nation’s top court took only minutes on Tuesday to throw out the case.