Nazeri Lajim

Nazeri bin Lajim (c. 1958 – 22 July 2022), full name Nazeri bin Lajim Hertslet, was a Singaporean drug trafficker. Prior to his arrest in April 2012, Nazeri went to prison several times for drug consumption and several other drug offences, and was said to be addicted to drugs at age 14. Nazeri and his Malaysian accomplice were both brought to trial and found guilty five years later on 8 August 2017.

While the accomplice was sentenced to life imprisonment and caning due to him being a courier, Nazeri was on the other hand, sentenced to death after the High Court found that he was not a courier, and after it rejected his defence that most of the drug supply seized were for the purpose of his own consumption. Throughout the next five years, Nazeri lost his appeals against his sentence and failed to obtain a presidential pardon twice. On 22 July 2022, the day after he failed to overturn his sentence for the final time, 64-year-old Nazeri was hanged at Changi Prison.

In May 2022, with the support of activists, Nazeri's family filed a second plea for clemency, but the petition was once again denied. Nazeri's 62-year-old younger sister Nazira stated that during her brother's imprisonment, she kept visiting her brother regularly but she feared that any of the visits she made could be her last. She stated that while she knew her brother's execution would highly likely be carried out, she still held on to hope and the case had made her decide to advocate for the death penalty to be abolished.

On 15 July 2022, Nazeri's family received his death warrant, which states that Nazeri's execution was scheduled to take place on 22 July 2022. Nazeri's execution warrant came just eight days after the double hangings of Norasharee Gous and Kalwant Singh Jogindar Singh on 7 July 2022.

Not only there were appeals for clemency in his case, the scheduling of Nazeri's execution brought attention and debate to the alleged racial makeup of Singapore's death row where most of the drug convicts were Malay. At that time, the Singapore government was facing the international pressure to not use the death penalty on drugs, but the government maintained that the death penalty was an effective deterrent and necessary punishment to deploy against serious crimes in Singapore, with over 80% of the population in Singapore supporting the use of capital punishment for murder and drug trafficking. The calls for abolition only intensified since March 2022 till Nazeri's death warrant, when the Singapore government authorized four executions (including Abdul Kahar Othman and Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam) after a two-year moratorium on all hangings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, the decision of Singapore to resume executions at the time Malaysia and Thailand decided to relax their approach on penalties for drug crimes brought more attention to the opposition of Singapore's death penalty laws.

On 19 July 2022, three days before he was due to hang, Nazeri filed another appeal to seek a stay of execution, but the High Court dismissed his application the next day.

On 21 July 2022, the eve of his execution, Nazeri submitted his final appeal to the Court of Appeal in a last-minute bid to escape the gallows. Nazeri, who represented himself via a video-link in Zoom, requested a deferment of between one to two weeks to allow him to engage legal representation. He also sought a court order that his capital charge was "arbitrarily imposed" and it thus violated his constitutional rights, and also sought a stay of execution pending court proceedings. He also argued his prosecution was unconstitutional by citing several cases of other offenders initially charged with importing drugs above the capital threshold, but later convicted of non-capital charges. He also added that some of his siblings and relatives had not visited him for the final time and he needed a bit more time. Senior State Counsel Anandan Bala and State Counsels Chan Yi Cheng and Rimplejit Kaur argued that there was no merit in Nazeri's appeal and it was an example of "drip-feeding" applications to prevent the law from taking its course, and stated that it was flawed for Nazeri to argue that the drug offenders who trafficked below and above the capital threshold respectively should be given the same treatment.

On 22 July 2022, 64-year-old Nazeri bin Lajim was hanged at dawn inside Changi Prison, thus becoming the fifth death row convict to be executed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Singapore. According to activist Kokila Annamalai, Nazeri's family reclaimed his remains from the prison, and there would be funeral prayers held at Masjid Assyakirin in Taman Jurong. Nazeri's remains were arranged for burial in the Muslim cemetery at Masjid Al-Firdaus. The Singapore Prison Service (SPS) confirmed to AFP in an email statement that Nazeri's capital sentence was carried out as scheduled.

In August 2022, a news report revealed that due to the case of Nazeri and several others (notably Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam), there were discussions among Singaporeans about the need for compassion for some death row inmates, since there were increasing citations by activists the cases of some drug traffickers who came from low-income families or having drug addictions before ending up on death row. However, despite the increased awareness, the public remains supportive of capital punishment for drugs, given that there were rampant rates of drug trafficking at the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia, the effectiveness of the death penalty in maintaining Singapore's low crime rate and the devastating impact drugs had on the addicts and their families.

In March 2021, Nazeri engaged human rights lawyer M Ravi to submit an application to re-open the case. Nazeri re-used his defence that he only meant to keep most of the drugs for his consumption and even added that prior to his capture, he wanted to return the second bundle after receiving it. He even prepared a psychiatric report to support his contention, and his former lawyer James Masih also admitted in another source that he overlooked certain matters during the trial that would have aided Nazeri's defence. The appeal however, was denied on 20 April 2021, as the judge Tay Yong Kwang found that there was sufficient evidence to prove Nazeri's guilt even with the shortcomings of Nazeri's former lawyer in the trial and appeal, and found that Nazeri's claims and new evidence should not be relied on due to the lack of credibility and its inconsistency with other trial evidence in Nazeri's case.

The lawsuit was dismissed on 16 March 2021. High Court judge See Kee Oon ruled that it may be allowed for prisons to make copies of the inmates' correspondence for screening and recording letters, they were not allowed to forward them to the AGC. Unless a prisoner consented so, the AGC will be denied access to these sources. However, the judge said that such a procedure was not the AGC's intention to take advantage over court proceedings but a negligence on their part.

In August 2021, an appeal was made by 17 Malay death row inmates, including Nazeri himself, against their death sentences on basis of alleged racist discrimination. It was revealed that between 2010 and 2021, Malays made up 66 of the 120 prosecutions for drug trafficking, where over 76% of them were sentenced to death. 50 out of 77 people sentenced to death between 2010 and 2021 were revealed to be Malays. Nazeri and the 16 other prisoners thus argued that the death penalty was discriminatory in nature when it comes to the different racial backgrounds of suspects facing capital charges based on the alleged "over-representation" of minorities (especially the Malays) on Singapore's death row. However, the appeal was dismissed by the courts on 2 December 2021, because there was no evidence to prove that these said inmates were treated differently due to their race, and these allegations would put the integrity of the law at stake and thus should be considered as an abuse of the court processes. The lawyers M Ravi and Cheng Kim Kuan were ordered to pay S$10,000 in costs of the lawsuit.

Since Nazeri failed to satisfy the requirements of a courier and not assessed with any mental illnesses, he was sentenced to death by Senior Judge Kan Ting Chiu on 8 August 2017, two years after the beginning of his trial. Nazeri's appeal against his sentence was dismissed by the Court of Appeal on 4 July 2018. It was revealed in 2022 that Nazeri's first clemency petition was dismissed on 10 July 2019, the same date when twelve other prisoners (including Gobi Avedian and Datchinamurthy Kataiah) also lost their appeals for clemency.

Another Singaporean, a 49-year-old ethnic Malay who was one of the 17 plaintiffs in Nazeri's racial bias lawsuit, was executed for a 2015 drug trafficking offence four days after Nazeri was hanged.

On 13 April 2012, 54-year-old Nazeri was caught for drug trafficking at Far East Shopping Centre in Orchard Road. His accomplice, a 24-year-old Malaysian named Dominic Martin Fernandez, was also arrested at another location after he went separate ways with Nazeri at the end of their delivery. In Dominic's possession, a brown envelope that he was carrying was seized and found to contain cash totaling about S$10,400. After searching Nazeri's sling bag, officers of the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) recovered two black-taped bundles which contained about 960g of heroin, which were estimated to have a street worth of S$144,000. A straw of heroin and a small flip-knife were also discovered inside the bag. Later, the drugs were weighed and a total of 33.89g of diamorphine (pure heroin) were discovered. Nazeri's trial took place three years later on 11 August 2015.

Nazeri was married sometime in the 1990s and fathered a son in 1998. However, the couple divorced as a result of Nazeri's drug addiction and frequent imprisonment. Still, despite the divorce, Nazeri's ex-wife still loved him, and he maintained a close relationship with his ex-wife, son and step-daughter.

Nazeri bin Lajim was born in 1958. He, his younger sister Nazira (born in 1960) and nine other siblings were born to a British father and Malay mother. Their father, who served as an administrator in the colonial British army, originally provided the family with a good income and fairly affluent life until the 1970s, when he lost his job as a result of the British Army removing all of its troops in Singapore. Nazeri's father initially planned to relocate to London to continue his tenure in the British army, but Nazeri's mother refused to leave Singapore due to her inability to communicate in English. As a result of Nazeri's father losing his job, the family fortunes declined greatly, and it took a toll on the health of Nazeri's father, who suffered a stroke and later died at age 45 the same year Nazeri was 18.