Capital punishment in Singapore

Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Singapore. The city-state had the second highest per-capita execution rate in the world between 1994 and 1998, estimated by the United Nations to be 13.83 executions annually per one million people during that period. The highest was Turkmenistan (now an abolitionist country) with 14.92. However, since the early 2010s, execution has become far less common, with some years having no executions at all. No one was executed in 2012 and 2013, and two persons were executed in 2014. Each execution in Singapore is carried out by long drop hanging in Changi Prison at dawn on Friday, except once on 20 May 2016 when the execution of Kho Jabing was carried out at 3:30 pm after his appeal for a stay of execution was dismissed that morning. In a survey done in 2005, reported in The Straits Times, 95% of Singaporeans believe that their country should retain the death penalty.

Singapore has had capital punishment since it was a British colony and became independent before the United Kingdom abolished capital punishment. The Singaporean procedure of hanging condemned individuals is heavily influenced by the methods formerly used in the United Kingdom.

In 2012, however, Singapore amended its laws to exempt some cases from the mandatory death sentence while boosting enforcement. Although the penalty will stay, discretionary measures are now given to judges.

The following table of executions was compiled by Amnesty International from several sources, including statistics supplied by the Ministry of Home Affairs in January 2001 and government figures reported to Agence France-Presse in September 2003. Numbers in brackets are the number of foreign citizens executed, according to information disclosed by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Detailed statistics are not released by the Singapore government from 2000 to 2006. Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong told the BBC in September 2003 that he believed there were "in the region of about 70 to 80" hangings in 2003. Two days later he retracted his statement, saying the number was in fact ten.

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