A former senior district judge has called for guidelines on how judges should use their discretion to decide if a capital offender should hang or get a life term.
At issue is whether such discretion will lead to inconsistency in sentencing, said Dr S. Chandra Mohan, now a Singapore Management University law don.
He raised these points in an article titled The Death Penalty and the Desirability of Judicial Discretion, in the current issue of the Law Society's Law Gazette.
His comments about granting judges complete discretion to impose death or life sentences for certain murder offences come at a time when the new provisions passed by Parliament last year could be tested in a murder case for the 1st time.
The sentence of death row inmate Kamrul Hasan Abdul Kudus, convicted of killing a 25-year-old maid, is set to be reviewed by the Court of Appeal in light of the new provisions. A pre-trial conference is due next month.
It is understood that the apex court could use the case to indicate how the new discretion is to be used by the courts in general.
Under the new laws, the mandatory death penalty is retained for intentional murder. But for three other forms of murder, the judge can impose a life term and caning.
"The real question that will plague our judges is how is consistency in sentencing murder cases to be maintained? What type of murders ... qualify more readily for the death penalty?" Dr Mohan wrote.
Source: The Star, March 24, 2013
