Quora Answer: Should Singapore Abolish the Death Penalty?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Should Singapore abolish the death penalty?”

The emotional argument presupposes that all lives are worth the same and all people are equal.  That is naïve and illogical.  We consider the facts.  The death penalty is an effective deterrent against serious crimes.  The laws are clear and explicit on the consequences of capital offences.  The judicial process of arriving at a verdict is sound.  There is no reason why it should be abolished.  It is a part of our legal philosophy, which emphasises prevention, as opposed to a punitive judicial system.  The idea is to make the penalties so severe that all but the most recalcitrant are deterred.  This is a form of social engineering where society values safety and the rights of the collective over the rights of a few criminals.  We also have to consider that if we hang enough of the right people, it cleans up the gene pool and benefits society.  We cannot allow an underclass of hardcore criminals to develop.  The death penalty is economically sound.  Some would advocate life imprisonment.  It costs us to feed murderers, rapists, drug traffickers and kidnappers for the rest of their lives.  It saves us money by hanging them as soon as the appeals process is over.  Those savings can be put towards the rehabilitation of people who can be rehabilitated.

Thirty-three offences currently carry the death penalty in Singapore, spread across the Penal Code, the Misuse of Drugs Act, the Arms Offences Act, and the Internal Security Act.  That number has moved in one direction only since 2012.  Amendments that year removed the mandatory element from some offences, giving judges discretion between death and life imprisonment with caning where intent to kill was less direct.  For murder under Section 300 of the Penal Code, the mandatory death penalty now applies only to Section 300(a), intentional killing.  The Abolition of Mandatory Death Penalty Act 2023 went further, removing capital punishment from the Kidnapping Act entirely, an offence that had carried a discretionary death sentence since 1961.  Singapore has not moved toward wholesale abolition.  It has moved steadily toward narrowing where the ultimate penalty applies, and toward giving judges room to weigh circumstances rather than following a fixed sentence automatically.

The Basis of the Legal Framework Today

The Misuse of Drugs Act sets a mandatory death penalty threshold at trafficking more than 15 grammes of pure heroin.  Singapore resumed executions in March 2022 after a two-year pandemic pause, and the numbers since have climbed: 11 drug-related executions in 2022, 5 in 2023, 8 in 2024, and 15 in 2025.  Every execution proceeds through a full appeal and clemency process, confirmed by the Central Narcotics Bureau in each case, including legal representation throughout, a hearing before the Court of Appeal, and a petition for presidential clemency before sentence is carried out.

Murder as a capital offence traces to the colonial-era Penal Code, predating independence by decades.  Its application during Singapore's founding years shows why the government treated it as non-negotiable.  Between 1963 and 1966, Indonesia waged the Konfrontasi against the planned Federation of Malaysia, carrying out at least 42 bomb attacks across Singapore.  On 10^th March 1965, two Indonesian marines, Osman bin Haji Mohamed Ali and Harun bin Said, planted a nitroglycerin bomb at MacDonald House on Orchard Road, killing three civilians and injuring 33.  Both men were tried for murder, convicted, and hanged on 17^th October 1968, despite a clemency plea from Indonesian President Suharto.  Their execution triggered a diplomatic crisis, with roughly 300 students storming the Singapore embassy in Jakarta.

The Kidnapping Act 1961 was introduced by Ong Pang Boon, then Minister for Home Affairs, and passed on 24^th May 1961, before the Konfrontasi began.  It responded to a specific wave of crime: in February 1964, Vee Ming Shaw, eldest son of Shaw Organisation founder Run Run Shaw, was kidnapped at gunpoint alongside his chauffeur and released twelve days later after a S$250,000 ransom was paid.  Rubber magnate Ng Quee Lam was abducted at gunpoint that November and released after a S$400,000 ransom.  The Act created a discretionary death penalty for kidnapping for ransom, and Lee Ah Kiew became the first person executed under it in 1987, after sentencing in 1985.  This capital provision no longer exists.  The 2023 abolition act removed it entirely, showing that the government position shifted over six decades, even while retaining capital punishment for drug trafficking and murder.

The Arms Offences Act was passed in 1973, seven years later, in direct response to a domestic wave of armed robbery and gun crime.  Singapore recorded 155 armed robbery cases between January and August 1973 alone.  Street shootouts, bank robberies, and armed kidnappings for ransom had become a recognised feature of Singapore crime through the 1950s, ‘60s, and into the early ‘70s, including the kidnappings of Tang Choon Keng and Shaw Vee Ming, both at gunpoint.  Capturing one infamous kidnapper, Loh Ngut Fong, in 1968 required roughly 350 policemen and Gurkha contingent troops.  Parliament passed the Arms Offences Bill in response to this sustained domestic crime wave, and it took effect in February 1974, mandating death for anyone using or attempting to use a firearm with intent to cause physical injury, extending to accomplices and arms traffickers.  The law worked immediately.  Armed robbery cases fell from 155 in the first eight months of 1973 to just 14 between September and November, once the bill’s provisions were announced.  Sha Bakar Dawood became the first person sentenced to death under the Act, in September 1975, after opening fire in a brothel and later shooting at police on Thiam Siew Avenue.

The Sedition Act was Retained at Independence

Singapore’s sedition law originates from British colonial legislation introduced in 1948, the same year the Malayan Emergency began, when the Malayan Communist Party's armed wing launched a sustained insurgency against colonial rule that lasted until 1960, later resurfacing as a second, lower-intensity insurgency through 1989.  When Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, that communist threat had not disappeared, and the Konfrontasi’s bombing campaign had ended only the year before.  The government’s official position has consistently been that retaining strong internal security legislation, including the Sedition Act and the earlier use of detention without trial under the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance, was necessary given this immediate backdrop.  Operation Coldstore, in February 1963, detained 113 individuals, including Barisan Sosialis leaders, under this framework, officially justified as neutralising a communist united front.  This remains contested history.  Some historians, drawing on declassified British records, argue the Barisan Sosialis pursued power through constitutional means and that the communist threat used to justify the operation was overstated for political convenience.  The government’s own position, then and now, holds that the threat was real and the legislation necessary.

Majority Support for the Death Penalty

Minister for Home Affairs and Minister for Law Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam has cited a run of Ministry surveys directly in Parliament.  The 2023 Survey on Singapore Residents’ Attitudes Towards the Death Penalty found 79.7 per cent of respondents agreed the death penalty deters large-scale drug trafficking more effectively than life imprisonment, up from 73.7 per cent in 2021.  By 2025, that figure had risen further, with 77 per cent supporting the mandatory death penalty for significant drug trafficking, up from 69 per cent in 2023, and 87 per cent supporting its use for the most serious offences generally.  A 2018 MHA study of non-Singaporeans likely to visit Singapore found 76 per cent believed the death penalty deters serious crime more effectively than life imprisonment, and a later regional study found 87 per cent of respondents in cities matching the origin profile of arrested traffickers held the same belief.

In plain economics, we must also consider the fact that execution is cheaper than lifelong incarceration.  This carries a real cost logic: housing, feeding, and providing medical care to a prisoner for decades is an ongoing fiscal commitment that a completed sentence does not carry.  Singapore’s own budget allocation for the Singapore Prison Service does not break this cost down by sentence type in public reporting, so a precise savings figure is not independently verifiable from published data.

While it is a eugenicist argument, we can callously state that it does clean up the gene pool and remove an underclass that is a threat to society.  Economic policies alone do not stop crime.  There are people who are simply recalcitrant and will never fit in.

Singapore’s Crime Data against Regional and Global Benchmarks

Singapore recorded a homicide rate of 0.07 per 100,000 people in 2023, among the lowest recorded anywhere in the world.  Malaysia recorded 0.7 per 100,000 in 2024, ten times Singapore’s rate.  Japan recorded 0.2 to 0.23 per 100,000.  The United Kingdom recorded 1.0 to 1.15 per 100,000 across 2021 to 2023.  The United States recorded 5.0 to 5.76 per 100,000 in 2023, more than seventy times Singapore’s rate and the highest among G7 nations by a wide margin, against Canada’s 1.98, France’s 1.34, and Germany’s 0.91 in the same year.

The United States recorded a firearm homicide rate of 4.4 per 100,000 in 2023, high among advanced economies though far below Latin American and Caribbean hotspots such as Jamaica at 41.9 and Ecuador at 39.5.  Singapore’s own Arms Offences Act has kept firearm-related crime at a level low enough that it rarely appears as a distinct category in international comparisons at all.

Numbeo’s 2026 Crime Index scores Singapore at 22.5, in the “very low” band, and falling for three consecutive years.  The United States scored 49.2 in the same 2026 dataset, down from 64.9 in 2012.  China scored 23.1, close to Singapore’s level, and Russia scored 38.2.  Global Law and Order Index data from 2022 ranked Singapore first in the world.

The 2025 Global Peace Index ranked Singapore sixth globally and first in Asia, ahead of Malaysia at 13^th, Japan at 17^th, Vietnam at 38^th, Thailand at 46^th, and Indonesia at 52^nd.  This index measures broader societal and political stability alongside crime, so the gap with Thailand and Indonesia reflects more than street-level crime rates alone, though both countries carry higher homicide and violent crime figures than Singapore on UNODC data as well.

When we consider major crimes such as homicides and drug trafficking, the numbers are the lowest in the world.  Singapore is safe because of these strict laws in addition to the sound economic policies.  Abolishing the death penalty is foolish.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code