Yong Vui Kong
Yong Vui Kong (born 23 January 1988) is a Malaysian who was sentenced to death in Singapore in 2008 for trafficking in heroin, and whose sentence was reduced to life imprisonment with caning in 2013 following amendments to the Misuse of Drugs Act. His case was a focus of anti-death-penalty advocacy in Singapore and produced several Court of Appeal rulings on the mandatory death penalty, the clemency power and prosecutorial discretion. He was represented from 2009 by M. Ravi, acting pro bono.
Arrest and conviction
Yong, from Sabah, Malaysia, was arrested on 12 June 2007 with 47.27 grams of heroin while working as a courier. He was 19 at the time. The alleged principal for whom he was working, Chia Choon Leng, was later arrested and charged with drug trafficking but was given a discharge not amounting to an acquittal and placed in indefinite detention.
At trial in the High Court, the judge invited the prosecution to consider reducing the charge in view of Yong's age; the prosecution declined. As trafficking in more than 15 grams of diamorphine then carried a mandatory death sentence, Yong was convicted and sentenced to death. He filed an appeal but withdrew it on 29 April 2009, and his clemency petition to President S. R. Nathan, submitted in August 2009, was declined in November 2009.
Appeals
On 2 December 2009, two days before the scheduled execution, M. Ravi took over the case and obtained a stay of execution. On 8 December 2009 the Court of Appeal — Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong, with Judges of Appeal Andrew Phang and V. K. Rajah — restored Yong's appeal, accepting that he had withdrawn it in the mistaken belief that he could not re-argue the constitutionality of the mandatory death penalty.
The appeal was heard on 15 March 2010. On 14 May 2010, in Yong Vui Kong v Public Prosecutor, the Court of Appeal held that the mandatory death penalty under the Misuse of Drugs Act did not infringe Articles 9(1) or 12(1) of the Constitution.
Ravi then sought judicial review of the clemency process, after the Minister for Law had referred to Yong's case in public remarks before the appeal judgment was delivered. On 4 April 2011 the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal against the refusal of leave, holding that the President had no personal discretion in exercising the clemency power and was required to act on Cabinet's advice, a conclusion it drew from Article 22P(1) of the Constitution and the legislative history of the power.
In March 2012 Ravi applied to reopen the appeal, arguing that Yong had been treated unequally because the Public Prosecutor had charged him capitally while applying for discharges not amounting to acquittals for the alleged principal. The argument followed an earlier 2012 ruling, in another case Ravi had argued, that prosecutorial discretion is subject to judicial review but that the applicant there had not shown the Public Prosecutor acted on irrelevant considerations or with bias. The application was dismissed on 4 April 2012.
Resentencing
In July 2012 the government agreed to amend the mandatory death sentence for certain drug-trafficking and murder offences, allowing those on death row to apply to have their sentences reduced to life imprisonment where defined conditions were met — including that the offender had acted only as a courier and had either substantively assisted the authorities or had impaired mental responsibility. Traffickers resentenced under the provision were to receive at least 15 strokes of the cane.
Yong was certified as having acted as a courier and as having substantively assisted the authorities. On 14 November 2013 his death sentence was lifted and he was resentenced to life imprisonment with 15 strokes of the cane, backdated to when he was first charged, becoming the first death-row drug trafficker resentenced under the amendments.
Following the resentencing, Ravi's office issued a statement in which Yong thanked the members of the public and the campaign groups that had supported his case — among them We Believe in Second Chances, the Singapore Anti-Death Penalty Campaign, the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network and Amnesty International — and the statement described judicial caning as a barbaric practice.
On 22 August 2014 Ravi appealed against the caning element of the sentence as unconstitutional, before Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon and Judges of Appeal Andrew Phang and Tay Yong Kwang. The appeal was dismissed on 4 March 2015.
Imprisonment
Under the rule that life imprisonment in Singapore means imprisonment for the remainder of the prisoner's natural life with possible parole after at least 20 years, Yong is eligible for a parole review after serving 20 years, including time in remand. The review is expected in 2027.