Last month, Singapore announced that later this year it would amend its laws to drop the mandatory death sentence for low-level traffickers. Judges would be given the discretion to order execution, or to award life sentences plus caning.
Singapore has stopped its hangings for a year while the new policy is mulled. It would never admit it but the international embarrassment caused by the Nguyen case and the jailing for contempt of court of the British writer Alan Shadrake over his book Once a Jolly Hangman might have had something to do with it. Full story
