By K.C. Vijayan, Senior Law Correspondent
The Straits Times
Monday, Mar 25, 2013

SINGAPORE – 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 comes at a time when the new provisions passed by Parliament last year could be tested in a murder case for the first time.

The sentence of death row inmate Kamrul Hasan Abdul Kudus, convicted of killing a…

The National Solidarity Party (NSP) and Think Centre (TC) have come together to organise a public consultation to discuss the proposed changes to the mandatory death penalty announced on 9 July. The following are the details provided on their event page on Facebook:

Apart from catalyzing public discourse on the proposed changes, the organisers aim to gather and present feedback from this public consultation to the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Law for their consideration.

These are some questions which we will be discussing at the forum: