Once a Jolly Hangman (26 page)

Hero Hanged

Shanmugam Murugesus hanging in May 2005 sparked unprecedented public discussion in Singapore. From April to August that year, local activists organised a public form, petitions, vigils and other events to campaign against the death penalty. But it wasn't easy. The authorities, using undercover police, did everything they could to thwart the campaign's vain bid to save the young man's life. Amnesty International sent a special representative to address the public form. A worried government prevented him from speaking and banned the use of the condemned man's face on posters on the grounds that it would 'glorify' an executed convict. Shanmugam was convicted of trafficking 1.03 kilograms of cannabis. A former jet ski champion and army regular, he was a struggling divorced father of twin teenage sons. His sons pleaded for him in leaflets they distributed in a first-ever public appeal in a capital crime. His mother made a tearful plea for him at the forum in heartbreaking poignancy which stunned forum participants. She also made an appeal that was captured on video.

Before he was sentenced to death in the High Court, Shanmugam pleaded for clemency saying he 'was in desperate financial circumstances, which led me to commit the offence which I wholeheartedly regret. The financial burdens on me were heavy as I had to look after my sons, my nieces, nephews and my mother who is in poor health and unable to work'. His statement of regret proved futile. Enter again Ravi, who was still recovering emotionally, physically and financially following the Vignes Mourthi case. He did not charge the family a cent for his service and was still repaying $7,000 for the funeral
expenses. His efforts did not make him popular with the Singapore government either. He had brought much foreign media attention while valiantly fighting to save the life of Vignes Mourthi, the kind of critical attention the government does not like. It made them look bad again in the eyes of other countries. As a result, Ravi also saw some of his long
time, very well-paying clients drop him as their solicitor because they feared that he was now viewed as an 'anti-establishment figure' who would reflect negatively on them. The Vignes Mourthi case was the first of its kind for Ravi. He normally dealt in areas of the law which paid well - civil litigation and intellectual property matters. And it made him reflect on what had really been accomplished. 'I hoped to get the people of Singapore thinking about the critical issues in the case', he said, 'to widen public awareness of how the judicial system here worked and also to get large numbers of Singaporeans asking if this was indeed a system that needs no reforms or refinements. The whole question of executions was of major importance to me as was the question of who gets executed here and why'. He was warmed one day by the visit of an Indian woman who had read of the Vignes Mourthi case and came to see him to express her concern that someone might be hanged wrongly and give some comfort and support to his distraught family. There was another person who had read of the Vignes Mourthi case. His name was Shanmugam Murugesu and he wanted to speak to Ravi.

Shanmugam, a Singaporean, was in custody. He was facing the death penalty, too, having been arrested on 30 August 2003, just four weeks before Vignes Mourthi was executed. Shanmugam had been arrested at the Tuas Checkpoint known as the second link joining Singapore to Malaysia with six packets of cannabis weighing 1,029 grams and 880 grams of cannabis mixture, over double the legal limit for mere possession in Singapore. He admitted he was a small time dealer but vehemently denied that he was transporting anywhere near the amount they found tucked away on his motorcycle. According to court records of his statements he maintained that he had brought only one packet of cannabis into Singapore weighing only 237 grams. He was not a stupid man and was aware of the consequences of being found in possession of more than that amount. He revealed his Malaysian supplier as an ethnic Chinese man named Mok who often encouraged him to traffic more despite his constant refusals. He

believed that the other five packets had been hidden in his bike by Mok without his knowledge. To support his claim he even gave police the name and telephone number of Mok hoping they would investigate him. But all they did was to call the number and accept Mok's word that he had never even heard of Shanmugam. He gave police all other kinds of information but they seemingly did not believe his story, especially that he had always dealt in small amounts of cannabis and that Mok always tried to get him to take on bigger assignments. As Mok was apparently never found let alone being charged as an accomplice, I was drawn to this issue again following my secret meeting with a former Central Narcotics Bureau officer. This man revealed to me that one of their practices, as undercover agents, was to encourage small time dealers to traffic much more than they wanted to, thus ending up on the gallows. So was 'Mok' an undercover agent and if so did he deliberately act to send Shanmugam to the gallows? It was while he was in a cell in Queenstown Remand Prison that Shanmugam heard about Ravi's valiant though futile fight to save Vignes Mourthi's life.

Until his world began falling apart, resulting in his arrest, Shanmugam was something of a local hero. He had grown up in poverty, the eldest of a struggling Indian Singaporean family. Shanmugam was determined to make something of himself. But he was not a good scholar, failed secondary school and began falling into bad company. His mother, Letchumi, a traditional conservative Tamil mother, took charge of his life and persuaded him to start over. He went back to school, his grades improved and eventually was accepted into Boys' School, something like the equivalent of a military academy. It was a fast track to the army which is where Shanmugam ended up four years later. He had a solid record in his near ten years on active service ended up with the rank of sergeant and seemed destined for the officers' ranks and a long career in the military. However, his marriage at the age of 21 served as a brake to his advancement in the army. Then he found himself the father to twin sons. The demands on his time in the military were not good for a man with a family of four. After eight years in the army as a combat engineer, Shanmugam made an even more admired career move. He became a sports star. He had always shone in his athletic pursuits but what he loved most was water jet skiing. He was so skilled and daring that he even represented Singapore
in the 1995 World Championship Jet Ski Finals in Lake Havasu, Arizona, USA, bringing home a medal, giving a huge and much-needed boost to
Singapore's international image as a sports nation. He was also involved in motorbike racing, deep-sea diving, boating and rope climbing, all of them risky pursuits. As a result Shanmugam had many female admirers and friends but he never broke his wedding vows. His clean reputation also resulted in him being appointed to the prestigious Singapore Sports Council where he served for four years.

One of Shanmugam's sideline businesses was repairing all kinds of motorised land or sea vehicles which kept him very busy. On the surface all seemed well but trouble was brewing in his marriage. It was an arranged union to a first cousin on his mothers side from India and it never became one of wedded bliss. He discovered that his wife was not as faithful as he was and on one occasion caught her 'entertaining' a boyfriend. He divorced his wife, won custody of the twin boys, then 12 years-old. His mother helped look after them. Other things began to go wrong in his life and he lost interest in his sports activities. His mother fell ill and he found himself being the sole breadwinner for her and his unmarried sister. A new promising relationship with an attractive American woman also suddenly came to an abrupt end. She had second thoughts about becoming a mother to his sons and decided to return to the US. All this made him extremely depressed and he tried to escape in the haze of cannabis smoke. Shanmugam took jobs as a taxi driver and part-time window cleaner and sometimes repaired boats in Johor Bahru, the town where Vignes Mourthi had lived until his arrest. Occasionally Shanmugam would meet up privately with friends in Johor to smoke some weed, throwing in $20 each to purchase what they needed. One of them, a Chinese man named Ah Seng, linked him up with Mok who was to become the shadowy figure in his eventual demise. He had a motorbike and a boat with problems and Shanmugam was the man to fix them. He also joined Shanmugam in smoking weed with his other friends which appeared to seal their friendship. Shanmugam also had a reputation of being too trusting, even gullible. What happened next should have been a warning to him.

By this time Shanmugam was now supporting not only his own family including his frail mother, but also a sister, Mahes, who had separated from her husband and her two sons. The burdens on his
shoulders, however broad and willing, were becoming too much for him. By a strange coincidence, his younger brother, Kuben, was a police officer and at one time was seconded to the Central Narcotics Bureau but at this time was a member of the marine police. Except for a minor traffic offence, Shanmugam did not have a single previous conviction before that fatal day, 30 August 2003. He had decided, with Mok as his supplier, to help solve his financial problems, to take small amounts of cannabis into Singapore and sell it. He was always sure never to carry an amount weighing more than 500 grams that would lead to the gallows and he only handled cannabis. He may have been too trusting of some people but he was not an idiot.

Instead of being able to contact Ravi to take on his case, he was represented by two court-appointed counsels, Ganesan and Rajah Retnam. His trial was in total contrast to the action-packed trial of Vignes Mourthi and Moorthy Angappan which dragged on full of suspense for almost five months. Shanmugam's trial lasted exactly four days. The only witnesses called were the defendant himself, arresting and interrogating officers,
police recorders - outnumbering him 23 to one - and a Tamil-language interpreter. "The same evidence against him was repeated over and over like layers of cement preventing any mental daylight to creep in', Ravi told me later after examining the case.

Shanmugam could only repeat that the other five packets totaling 1,880 grams of cannabis and mixed cannabis had been secreted into cavities in his motorcycle by someone else, mostly likely the now mysterious Mok who had been encouraging him to trade higher but without success for months. He maintained that he knowingly had just under 300 grams in his possession - not a hanging offence. One of the issues against Shanmugam was that he was slow in naming Mok as his supplier. His answer was that he did not want to get this man, whom he regarded as a friend, into trouble. But as time went on, especially after revealing all he knew about him, he was certain he was the one who landed him in all this trouble, and quite deliberately. The trial began on 19 April 2004 and was all over four days later. Judge Tay Yong Kwang decided that Shanmugam's account was 'highly unlikely to be true'. Shanmugan also claimed he had been 'severely intimidated' during his interrogation with officers shouting at him, even slapping him on the side of his head several times. In Singapore suspects have no right to
legal counsel during interrogations and very rarely do any lawyers even get to see their clients during the early stages of their confinement. The prosecution denied all these allegations, however, and persuaded the court that it was Shanmugam's intention to smuggle a larger amount of cannabis was purely to make a larger amount of money. At 11.46 a.m. on 23 April Judge Tay adjourned to his chambers to consider his verdict. He must have already made up his mind. He was back at 11.59 a.m. The sentence was death. At his flat in Woodlands, Darshan Singh checked his diary. He knew he would be making a special entry very soon and he wanted to know what else he would be doing over the next few months.

Shanmugan arrived on death row that evening and Darshan Singh would soon be busy weighing and measuring this very fit young man noting his muscularity which he would have to take into account when calculating the drop so to ensure a humane execution. But first the routine appeals stage had to be gone through. Shanmugam's second lawyer was Peter Fernando, who had handled many drug cases over a long career with an enviable record of successful defences - but not necessarily capital offences. His appeal, filed on 25 October 2004, was again heard before Chief Justice Yong Pung How with Judge Chow Hick Tin and Kan Ting Chiu. It was just routine with both sides repeating what had already been said at the original trial. The appeal was, predictably, dismissed. All Shanmugam could do now was to sit on death row and pray for a presidential clemency. The chances were grim. Only six had been granted in the 40-year history of the Republic. Perhaps a miracle in that case would be more likely. But if the Government was angry with attorney and human rights activist M. Ravi exposing the dark side of Singapore coldly efficient justice system in the Vignes Mourthi case, they were in for a bigger surprise this time. The zealous lawyer took up the cause before the President's clemency ruling was issued, realising that the odds were against getting a clemency ruling. This time he took a different tack, a new strategy. He decided to take the battle to the court of public opinion as well. His ideas soon won the approval of Shanmugam's family, including his police officer brother, Kuben. In the
petition to the President which his appeal lawyers had prepared, the team cited six cases from just the previous two years in which individuals had been arrested for

possession of cannabis wherein the amount was officially reduced to 499 grams, allowing the defendant to escape the death penalty. In five of the cases the original amounts of cannabis had been higher than what Shanmugam himself was caught with. The plea also mentioned he had been ready to cut such a deal with the prosecuting attorneys but found his offer spurned, with no reason given. The petition also included letters attesting to his character from his two sons, both his parents, his former girlfriend now living back in America and his brother, Kuben, the Singapore policeman. The case for clemency looked good but Ravi felt it needed something more. And there wasn't much time before the President made his decision.