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Singapore | Inside the prison that executes people for supplying cannabis

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Singapore CNN  — Though he is provided with a straw mat, Matthew says he prefers to sleep on the concrete floor of his cell in the maximum-security wing of Singapore’s Changi Prison. “It’s more cooling that way,” says the 41-year-old former schoolteacher, who was sentenced to more than seven years in prison and seven strokes of the cane for selling methamphetamine. CNN met Matthew, who spoke on condition that his last name be withheld, during an exclusive tour of Changi Prison provided by Singapore authorities as they defended the city-state’s uncompromising position on drugs.

Pennsylvania | Death row killer Jacob Sullivan dies of natural causes

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Jacob Sullivan
Jacob Sullivan, sentenced to death in March 2019 for the rape, murder and dismemberment of his then-girlfriend’s 14-year-old daughter, Grace Packer, died of natural causes Thursday, state and Montgomery County officials said Friday.

Sullivan, 47, died from a ruptured aortic aneurysm, a spokesperson for the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office said.

Sullivan, who was incarcerated at SCI Phoenix in Skippack, died at a local hospital, said state corrections spokesperson Maria Finn, who declined to say what he was being treated for.

Sullivan made headlines for the brutality to which he and his then-girlfriend, Sara Packer, subjected Grace, her daughter, in a Quakertown, Bucks County, house in 2016.

Sullivan admitted that he kidnapped, raped, and killed Grace with Sara’s help. 

After raping the girl, Sullivan choked her to death, he told authorities. 

The couple stored her body in kitty litter, cut up the remains with a bow saw, and disposed of them in the woods of Luzerne County.

“You have no soul,” Bucks County Judge Diane E. Gibbons told Sullivan when she sentenced him to death. “You are not human.”

Sara Packer pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

On the witness stand, she expressed disdain for the child, whom she had adopted with her ex-husband. 

“Grace had become, for lack of a better word, a nonentity,” she said. "I wanted her to go away.”

In July 2016, the couple drove Grace from a home they rented in Abington to another they rented near Quakertown, where Sullivan raped her after taking Viagra. 

The couple later drugged Grace, bound her wrists and ankles with zip ties, gagged her, and locked her in a cedar closet, Packer testified.

Finding Grace alive the next day, a “panicked” Sullivan strangled her, according to trial testimony.

With Sullivan’s death, 130 inmates remain on the state’s death row. 

All are men, according to the Department of Corrections. 

The state has not executed anyone since 1999.

Source: inquirer.com, Mensah M. Dean, May 1, 2020


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Pennsylvania, USA
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Singapore | Inside the prison that executes people for supplying cannabis

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