2025's first execution notice

I wrote about Syed Suhail bin Syed Zin when he received an execution notice in 2020. It was the second notice he and his family received that year; the first scheduled execution in February had been suddenly postponed the night before. On 17 September 2020, one day before his second scheduled execution, he was granted a stay of execution. On 19 January, a Sunday morning that Syed’s sister Mila should have spent peacefully with her young children, she instead received another execution notice for her brother. His execution has been scheduled for 23 January, giving his loved ones just four days to see him before he’s taken to the gallows.

When we speak over the phone, Mila says that her brother had known an execution notice could be coming; his appeal to President Tharman Shanmugaratnam for clemency was rejected earlier this month. But he hadn’t expected it so soon; he’d thought that he would at least have until after the Lunar New Year holiday. Just a week ago he’d been ill, suffering from terrible pain late at night. He was given medicine, he told his sister, and when one type of medication didn’t work the prison would give him something else to take. He kept throwing up, so they gave him anti-vomiting meds. When he asked to go to the hospital, Syed said, he was told that the prison doctor was “not very keen” to send him. He told Mila that it was only in the early hours of the morning, after multiple types of medication hadn’t worked, that he was finally sent to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with pancreatitis. 

Syed only returned to prison from hospital a few days ago; after visiting him on Sunday, Mila told me that he'd received the execution notice just one day after going back to his death row cell. A stent had been inserted while he was in hospital; he’s supposed to be going back in about three weeks’ time so the doctors can assess his condition. Now it doesn’t look as if Syed can make it for his check-up.

Syed was sentenced to the mandatory death penalty on 2 December 2015—he’s spent close to a decade on death row. He’s fought hard for his life and the lives of his fellow death row prisoners. It's made a huge impact on Singapore’s anti-death penalty movement. When I wrote about Syed back in 2020, there was not yet a Transformative Justice Collective (TJC). It was the public’s response to Syed—the outpouring of support for him and the number of signatures calling for mercy—that fuelled our motivation to start TJC to not only work on the death penalty issue but also open up much-needed space to talk about drugs and drug policy, policing and incarceration. I remember how determined Syed had been to collate information on death row cases and get activists a rough count of the number of men on death row, at a time when such information was incredibly difficult to come by. I remember being shocked by the number he passed on to us because it was so much higher than what my best guess had been. After years of anti-death penalty activism, feeling my way around based on the very limited information I could glean from the families I was in touch with, Syed was the first to give me a clear view of the devastating scale of capital punishment in Singapore. He encouraged other death row prisoners to speak up and urged his family to do the same with the loved ones of other prisoners. His case was also key to revealing the extent to which death row prisoners’ private correspondence had been copied and forwarded by the Singapore Prison Service to the Attorney-General’s Chambers. The Court of Appeal ruled last year that the prison and the AGC had acted unlawfully and in breach of confidence with regard to forwarding the letters of 13 death row prisoners (one of whom had his death sentence set aside in 2020).

There isn’t much time left. Syed is no longer fighting for mercy or a stay of execution. Compared to the previous execution notices he’d received—a horrifyingly traumatic experience for him and his family every time—Mila says that he seems to be “doing better”. He’s no longer planning to campaign for himself, but that doesn’t mean he intends to sit back and accept everything passively. When she calls me on Monday night, Mila says Syed asked for his recent experience of having to fight for the medical attention he needed to be made public, because he doesn’t want any other prisoner to have to go through the same thing should they ever be in need of hospitalisation. He’s also worried about death row conditions; he says that prisoners are now in cells with solid metal doors, where previously they had half-grille doors. (This is something I've also heard from other prisoners' families.) It’s not quite so bad now, Syed says, because it’s the cool, rainy season, but he worries about prisoners “roasting” in their cells once the temperature climbs. Prisoners are also much more isolated now; Syed told Mila that they’ve been spaced out so it’s no longer possible to talk to the prisoners in the cells to one’s left or right. Hearing that, I immediately start to wonder if this is the authorities’ attempt to make it difficult, even impossible, for death row prisoners to discuss cases or potential strategies to fight for their lives and the abolition of the death penalty.

I've sent questions to the Singapore Prison Service about their protocol for sending prisoners to hospital and the reasoning behind putting death row prisoners in such isolating conditions. Given how little time Syed has left (barring the miracle that I'm always praying for), I've chosen to publish this issue of the newsletter before waiting to hear back from them. I will update this piece on the website when, or if, I hear back from the prison.