Kho Jabing gets another 11th-hour stay of execution
Convicted murderer Jabing Kho’s has had his second eleventh-hour appeal against his death sentence turned down on Thursday afternoon. Photo: courtesy of Singaporean police
PUBLISHED: 5:41 PM, MAY 19, 2016
UPDATED: 1:21 AM, MAY 20, 2016
SINGAPORE — In an unprecedented move, convicted murderer Kho Jabing was granted a stay of execution less than 12 hours before his scheduled hanging before daybreak on Friday (May 20), after his latest unsuccessful challenge in “innumerable” attempts to get off death row.
This eleventh-hour stay of execution is the second for the 31-year-old Sarawakian who had bludgeoned a Chinese construction worker to death in 2008. In November last year, he secured a stay of execution less than 48 hours before he was due to hang by mounting an appeal, which failed.
Confirmation of the latest stay order came late last night, with the dramatic development capping a failed appeal earlier in the day which sealed Kho’s fate — the fourth occasion the apex court has considered his case.
Lawyers had locked horns in Judicial Commissioner Kannan Ramesh’s chambers from 5.30pm to 8.45pm over an application by Kho’s lawyer Jeannette Chong-Aruldoss for a stay of execution. When he rejected the application and the defence lawyer indicated she would appeal, the judge gave an interim order suspending Kho’s execution scheduled at 6am today, on the condition the lawyer’s papers were filed by 11pm last night.
Mrs Chong-Aruldoss made the deadline, and with that, postponed Kho’s execution.
The matter will be heard in the Court of Appeal at 9am on Friday.
Kho was sentenced to the mandatory death penalty after he killed Chinese construction worker Cao Ruyin during a robbery near Geylang Drive by bashing the victim on the head with a tree branch that caused 14 skull fractures.
His roller-coaster court bid began in 2011 with a failed challenge against the murder conviction, only to be spared the hangman’s noose two years later when amendments to the mandatory death penalty regime kicked in that gave judges the discretion to sentence certain types of murderers to life imprisonment instead.
But his reprieve was scrubbed, on appeal by prosecutors. Last year, he failed to commute the sentence with an argument that there was new and compelling evidence to prove a miscarriage of justice.
His latest challenge yesterday revolved around Judge of Appeal Andrew Phang’s involvement in two stages of his case, which his lawyer Gino Hardial Singh contended was “a breach of natural justice” as it was akin to having a person be a judge in his own cause.
In dismissing the argument, Judge of Appeal Chao Hick Tin, who delivered the judgment on behalf of the five judges, said it was a rehash of a point Kho had brought up in last year’s appeal — although he withdrew the argument before the hearing.
Justice Chao said it is an abuse of court process for one to file, then withdraw, an argument, and after the application is dismissed, file a fresh application premised on the withdrawn argument. “If this were allowed, applicants would prolong matters ad infinitum by drip-feeding their arguments one-by-one through the filing of multiple applications. We cannot allow this. No court would ever allow this,” the judge added.
But even if Kho had raised this as a new argument, Justice Chao said the apex court would still have dismissed his application since under the “correct legal perspective”, Justice Phang was ruling on completely different issues in the two previous stages of Kho’s case.
Justice Chao also noted that it has been eight years since Kho’s arrest, and after “an innumerable number of legal applications later, he still stands before the court”.
He added: “We said that there comes a point, after the appeals have been heard and the applications for reviews have been decided, when the legal process must recede into the background and give way to the search for repose. We think the time has come.”
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