Datchinamurthy Kataiah

Datchinamurthy a/l Kataiah (born c. 1985) is an Indian Malaysian who was sentenced to death in Singapore for drug trafficking. Datchinamurthy was found guilty of trafficking 44g of heroin across the Woodlands Checkpoint from Malaysia to Singapore in January 2011. Having been convicted of the crime and also not certified as a courier, Datchinamurthy was sentenced to death in 2015. He has an accomplice, Christeen d/o Jayamany, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for the same offence.

After Datchinamurthy lost his appeal in January 2016, he tried to appeal to the President of Singapore for clemency to commute his sentence to life imprisonment. The clemency process took three years before it finally concluded and it was decided that Datchinamurthy should be executed and thus clemency was denied. Currently, Datchinamurthy is on death row pending his legal challenges to delay his execution and to challenge his death sentence.

Personal life[]

Born in 1985 in Malaysia, Datchinamurthy a/l Kataiah grew up as an only son with his three sisters Logheswari, Sathirani and Saraswathy in his family. After he finished his schooling at an unspecified level and reached his adult years, Datchinamurthy eventually became engaged to a woman, whose first name is Priya, and later, Priya was pregnant with their first child, who was born sometime after Datchinamurthy was arrested for drug trafficking in Singapore.^[1]

Crime and sentence[]

Capture and trial[]

On 18 January 2011, Datchinamurthy, together with a Singaporean accomplice Christeen Jayamany, were arrested at the Woodlands Checkpoint by the Singapore authorities for allegedly trafficking over 44.96g of heroin across the border of Singapore from Malaysia. As the amount of trafficked heroin exceeds the legal minimum of 15g, Datchinamurthy and Christeen were both charged with capital drug trafficking, which warrants the mandatory death penalty in Singapore if found guilty. They were later both tried in the High Court of Singapore for the alleged offences.

According to both the defendants' accounts, prior to their capture, Chirsteen, who was facing financial difficulties and needed money to take care of her children, was hired by Datchinamurthy through connections and introductions to other people. She was asked to deliver something by Datchinamurthy, who provided her a bag which she should pass to another person, and Datchinamurthy stated he will pay her $200 once the job is done. Christeen also stated she did not know that the bag contained packages of drugs.

Likewise, Datchinamurthy denied that he had any knowledge of the drugs. He stated he was offered a job by a friend named "Rajah", who wanted to pay him to deliver some drugs, which Rajah assured him were "not serious" and Datchinamurthy thus believed he was delivering traditional Chinese medicine after checking the bags himself and thus did not suspect anything; the drugs, according to him, looked brown and did not look white (which was the normal appearance of heroin). Datchinamurthy was also in charge of relaying messages between Rajah and Christeen. Hence, both accused persons sought to downplay their conduct and paint themselves as couriers, through their defence lawyers, to escape the death penalty. Under the law, should a drug convict was merely acting as courier or suffering from diminished responsibility, he or she will only be eligible for life imprisonment but not death.

On 8 May 2015, the trial judge Tay Yong Kwang determined that both Christeen and Datchinamurthy were guilty as charged, as he fund both of them aware of the existence of heroin and hence failed to rebut the presumption of knowledge. Justice Tay found that in Datchinamurthy's case, he was not acting as a simple drug runner, as he was promised rich payment around hundreds of dollars (in both SGD and Malaysian Ringgit) by his alleged boss Rajah, and he had also took the role of hiring Christeen in helping him to deliver the drugs. It was impossible for him to have huge trust on Rajah, with whom he had a short encounter, and he also demonstrated his huge suspicion that he was carrying illegal drugs, which should have been reflected from the way of operations and delivery. Hence, Datchinamurthy failed to prove himself as a courier and hence, he was sentenced to death by hanging. Christeen, who was certified as a courier and had given substantive assistance to the authorities in tackling drug offences, was spared the gallows and she was therefore sentenced to life imprisonment, with effect from the date of her arrest. Christeen also did not receive caning since she was a female.^[2]

Appeal and clemency plea[]

Datchinamurthy later filed an appeal against his sentence. However, the Court of Appeal of Singapore dismissed his appeal on 5 February 2016, as the three judges - Chao Hick Tin, Andrew Phang and Kan Ting Chiu - determined that Datchinamurthy had failed to rebut the legal presumption of him carrying the illegal drugs and the totality of evidence had suggested no error in convicting Datchinamurthy of his original drug trafficking charge.^[3]

Datchinamurthy subsequently submitted an appeal for clemency to the President of Singapore, hoping that his death sentence can be commuted to life imprisonment. Should he succeeded in receiving the pardon, Datchinamurthy would become the first person to escape the gallows after the 1998 clemency pardon of Mathavakannan Kalimuthu, who was, at age 19, guilty of murdering a gangster in 1996. Mathavakannan was paroled and released in 2012 after serving 16 years out of his life sentence due to good behaviour.^[4][5] Datchinamurthy's family and his fianceé gathered to plead for clemency from the Singapore government on his life, and they stated there was no fair trial for Datchinamurthy, since he was allegedly being subjected to different treatment from Christeen, who was given a life sentence instead of death, unlike Datchinamurthy.^[6][7]

In July 2019, Datchinamurthy's clemency appeal was dismissed by President Halimah Yacob, on the advice of the Cabinet. Three other Malaysian convicts on death row - Gobi Avedian, Abdul Helmi Ab Halim and Rahmat - also lost their clemency pleas at around the same time Datchinamurthy failed to receive his pardon.^[8][9] There were international fears that this phenomenon might signal a rise in executions of drug traffickiers in Singapore, and some Malaysian lawyers also claimed that Singapore had intentionally targeted Malaysian death row convicts, which the Singapore government refuted in return.^[10][11]

Other legal developments[]

While he was still pending his petition for clemency, together with fellow Malaysian drug convict (16 November 1987 – 14 July 2017), Datchinamurthy and his mother, through his Malaysian lawyer, filed a petition to the , asking for the matter to be taken to the International Court of Justice to prosecute Singapore for the conviction of Malaysian citizens for drug trafficking. However, in March 2017, this lawsuit was not accepted as the Malaysian court has no jurisdiction in a matter related to foreign policy.^[12][13][14]

After the loss of his clemency petition, on the orders of the President of Singapore, a death warrant was issued for Datchinamurthy, who was scheduled to hang on 12 February 2020 at Changi Prison for his crime. However, the execution date was postponed due to a last-minute appeal filed by Datchinamurthy to delay his execution. Datchinamurthy, together with another Malaysian , alleged that the executions at Changi Prison were carried out by kicking the back of the prisoner's neck in the event of the rope breaking, which meant that the convicts would be suffering from unlawful execution and thus being unfairly treated by law.^[15] This legal application was dismissed by the High Court on 13 February 2020.^[16] Datchinamurthy's lawyer M Ravi also alleged that he was threatened by the prosecution in relation to this matter, which was also rejected by the High Court.^[17] The Attorney-General's Chambers (AGC) also issued correction orders under POFMA towards Malaysian human rights group Lawyers for Liberty for starting the above allegations of illegal execution methods, calling these claims "baseless" and "untrue".^[18] The Court of Appeal also affirmed the High Court's decision to dismiss the lawsuit in August 2020.^[19][20]

Datchinamurthy was also involved in another lawsuit, which was about the claims of the private letters between the death row inmates and both their lawyers and families were being forwarded from prisons to the AGC, and it led to these said inmates pursuing legal proceedings against the AGC or its members for alleged breaches of conduct to protect the inmates' rights, misconduct in public office and seeking damages for any harm caused by such. Iskandar, together with 21 other death row inmates (most of whom sentenced for drug trafficking), were represented by human rights lawyer M Ravi to seek the identities of whoever ordered or carried out the sending of the inmates' information to the AGC. The lawsuit was dismissed on 16 March 2021. The inmates, including Datchinamurthy, are ordered to pay $10 in costs for the lawsuit.^[21][22][23] Still, Datchinamurthy and 12 other prisoners out of the 22 original plaintiffs filed civil suits against the Attorney-General of Singapore for this issue, and this is currently pending in the courts.^[24]

Separate from Datchinamurthy's case, another death row convict tried to make use of Datchinamurthy's case to argue he was discriminated by nationality regaarding the scheduling of executions. , a Singaporean drug offender who was sentenced to death on 2 December 2015, tried to argue that he was sentenced to death on a date which took place later than Datchinamurthy, yet his own execution was conducted earlier than Datchinamurthy's unscheduled hanging, and due to the travel restrictions of foreigners' entry into Singapore to visit their relatives in prison due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore, he was discriminated as a Singaporean through the scheduling of executions. However, this was not accepted by the courts, as they stated that Datchinamurthy, compared to Suhail who had exhausted all his avenues of appeal, had a different situation given he still have recourse to review his case and appeal, and it was baseless to allege any discriminatory practices against inmates based on nationality in scheduling their executions. Hence, Suhail lost this legal attempt to delay his execution.^{[25][26][27][28]}

Datchinamurthy later filed a legal application to the courts to review his case. The review ended with the Court of Appeal upholding the death sentence passed upon Datchinamurthy on 5 April 2021.^[29]

See also[]

• Capital punishment in Singapore
• Pannir Selvam Pranthaman
• Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam

References[]