Delivering Fair, Consistent, and Reliable Sentences for Murder in Singapore
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Singapore Journal of Legal Studies
[2022] 290-308
DELIVERING FAIR, CONSISTENT, AND RELIABLE
SENTENCES FOR MURDER IN SINGAPORE
CHAN WING CHEONG*
The mandatory death penalty for murder was changed in Singapore in 2012 to give judges the dis-
cretion to choose between imposing the death penalty or life imprisonment (with caning) in cases
of non-intentional murder. This article reviews the sentences for murder since then and the factors
considered by the courts to justify the use of the death penalty or not. The move from an inherently
arbitrary mandatory regime to a discretionary one was a watershed moment in Singapore, and it is
questioned if the time has come for the death penalty for murder to be abolished completely.
I. INTRODUCTION
Singapore is one of a small number of dwindling countries in the world that still
uses the death penalty as a form of criminal punishment.1 This 'exclusive club'
comprises 55 countries found mostly in Asia and the Middle East.2 Among these
countries, Singapore belongs to an even smaller group of countries where the death
penalty is regularly carried out for certain offences such as drug trafficking and
murder.3
* Professor of Law, Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University. I wish to thank
Michael Hor and the anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. The title
of this article recalls the famous dissent by Justice Blackmun in Callins v Collins 510 US 1141 (1994)
at 1145:
I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death ... The basic question - does the system accu-
rately and consistently determine which defendants 'deserve' to die? - cannot be answered in the
affirmative ... The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal, and moral error gives us a
system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair,
consistent, and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.
Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2020 (Amnesty International Ltd, 2021);
Wing-Cheong Chan, The Death Penalty in Singapore: In Decline but Still Too Soon for Optimism
(2016) 11 Asian J Criminology 179.
2 Most known executions took place in China, Iran, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
s See Andrew Novak, The Global Decline of the Mandatory Death Penalty (New York: Ashgate
Publishing Limited, 2014). Giada Girelli & Ajeng Larasati, The Death Penalty for Drug Offences:
Global Overview 2021 (Harm Reduction International, 2022) at 8 note that although 35 countries retain
the death penalty for drug offences in law, only a small number actually impose the death sentence or
carry it out. In terms of murder, Brunei and Sri Lanka are examples of countries where the mandatory
death penalty is retained in law for that offence, but neither country has executed anyone for at least ten
years: Amnesty International, supra note 1.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/sjls2022&div=25&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Delivering Fair, Consistent, and Reliable Sentences for Murder in Singapore
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