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SINGAPORE – In a final verdict ending a rare legal case that has seen many twists and turns in the past nine years, a 34-year-old Nigerian was acquitted of a capital drug trafficking charge after the Court of Appeal revoke its 2015 decision to convict him.
After a 4-1 split decision, a panel of five judges ruled on Thursday (September 17) that his previous judgment can no longer be upheld after new evidence emerged that Ilechukwu Uchechukwu Chukwudi was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Symptoms (PTSS) when lied. to narcotics officers in 2011.
The majority, comprised of Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Appellate Justices Andrew Phang and Judith Prakash, and Chief Justice Chao Hick Tin, overturned their convictions after concluding that the 2015 decision was “demonstrably incorrect.”
Ilechukwu arrived in Singapore from Nigeria on November 13, 2011, bringing a black suitcase with him. He passed it on to Singaporean Hamidah Awang, who was later arrested at Woodlands Checkpoint after nearly 2kg of methamphetamine was found inside.
Ilechukwu was arrested in his hotel room the next morning.
He was originally acquitted by the Superior Court in 2014 after the judge accepted his testimony that he did not know the suitcase contained drugs.
The prosecution appealed to a three-judge Court of Appeal, which overturned the acquittal and sentenced him.
What tipped the balance at the time were the many lies told by Ilechukwu in his statements, which the supreme court concluded could only be explained by “the understanding of his guilt.”
In 2017, the Nigerian’s lawyers succeeded in getting the high court to reopen the case.
This was after a report from the Institute of Mental Health, prepared by the prosecution for sentencing, stated that Ilechukwu suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after witnessing a massacre when she was five years old.
The case was returned to the Superior Court for a hearing in which four psychiatrists, three from the defense and one from the prosecution, were called to give their expert opinion on post-traumatic stress disorder.
In their sentencing on Thursday, the majority said: “In our view, there is now a plausible innocent explanation that accounts for the plausible’s lies and omissions in his statements.”
The high court accepted evidence from defense psychiatrists that Ilechukwu’s history of PTSD and his PTSS in 2011 “may have led him to vastly overestimate the threat to his life” and that “this, in turn, may have led to the applicant to utter the unsophisticated and blatant falsehoods in his statements in an attempt to escape the death penalty and save his life. “
If these tests had been before the supreme court in 2015, “the result would have been different,” said the majority.
In his dissenting trial, Appellate Judge Tay Yong Kwang said he did not believe the new evidence revealed any errors in the earlier decision to convict the Nigerian.
“I sympathize with the applicant for his past suffering regarding the horrors he had witnessed in his homeland, especially as a child.
“However, in the final analysis of all the evidence here, the applicant’s defense was actually a highly improbable account from a totally unreliable and false source,” he said.
Judge Tay described the defense as “a case of hypothesis built on hypotheses built on hypotheses, in order to try to explain a continuous and consistent stream of highly focused lies.”
The Ilechukwu legal team, Mr. Eugene Thuraisingam, Mr. Suang Wijaya, Mr. Johannes Hadi and Ms. Jerrie Tan, said in a press release: “We are delighted that justice has prevailed.”
The attorneys, who acted under the Capital Crimes Legal Assistance Plan, said: “It has been a long and close pro bono case, involving specialized psychiatric evidence and cross-cultural sensitivity issues.
“Had it not been for the serendipitous production of the IMH report, our client would have been sentenced to death or life imprisonment.”
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