Jagjit Singh, a former Sessions Court judge, said mistakes could be made by the courts, leading to irreversible outcomes.

“The risk of executing innocent persons is very serious. We need to bear this in mind.

“Do we have honest, trustworthy, responsible and credible enforcement, investigation and prosecution officers?” he said at a talk on the death penalty at St Ignatius Church last night.

He gave the example of his own experience as a deputy public prosecutor 25 years ago, when he and fellow retired judge Mah Weng Kwai were on opposite sides of the court.

Jagjit had been prosecuting a person charged with trafficking drugs, an offence punishable by death. Mah meanwhile was defending him.

Jagjit said both he and Mah had appeared before then-High Court judge Nik Hashim Nik Abdul Rahman. In the witness box was a very senior police officer with the rank of assistant superintendent.

Jagjit recalled the testimony of the raiding officer that he had administered a cautioned statement, and that the suspect had confessed to trafficking the drugs.

“It was in the police report,” he added. “The case was watertight. The accused would have been sentenced to death if not for Mah.”

During his cross-examination of the officer, Jagjit said, Mah had asked the ASP to read out the cautioned statement. The officer replied that he did not remember but that he had it written on a piece of paper.

When asked to produce the paper, the officer took out his wallet and showed a piece of paper stuck to a telephone card.

“Mah took the paper and turned it here and there. I was observing him, trying to figure out what he was doing,” Jagjit said.

He said Mah had prodded the officer on the cautioned statement, suggesting that the officer had not read it to the suspect and that the paper had not existed at the time of the arrest.

The officer disagreed on both counts, he added.

“Then Mah said, ‘Officer, peel off the paper from the card.’ And true enough, the card was a World Cup football telephone card which had not existed at the time of the accused’s arrest.

“If it had not been for Mah, another innocent life would have been lost,” he said. “Can we place our lives, the lives of our children and relatives, in the hands of so-called dedicated and committed senior raiding enforcement officers?”

Twenty years later, Jagjit said, Mah would go on to become a Court of Appeal judge. Almost every week, there were drug trafficking and murder cases which carry the mandatory death penalty.

Other common offences punishable by death include treason, waging war against the king, and discharging firearms.

Noting that there were 1,267 people currently on death row, Jagjit questioned how effective the death penalty was in deterring such offences.

“There is no data to show that it serves as an effective deterrent,” he said. “There has been no significant reduction in the number of crimes, especially murder and drug trafficking.”

He gave examples of high-profile executions, including that of Botak Chin (armed robbery), Mona Fandey (murder) and members of the Al-Ma’unah militant group who were charged and convicted with waging war against the king.

“Did the executions serve as a deterrent? The answer is no.

“There is still the Altantuya murder case. Where is the deterrent?”

He gave the example of another case he had taken on as a lawyer in 2015 involving two sisters, aged 19 and 21, in Johor Bahru who were wrongly accused of drug trafficking.

He said the cops had claimed they were able to see one of the girls placing a packet of drugs in the refrigerator when this was in fact impossible as the window was heavily tinted.

The girls were eventually acquitted but not before having to spend two years under remand over the drug trafficking charge, he said.

De facto law minister Liew Vui Keong has said that amendments to abolish the death penalty will be tabled at the current parliamentary sitting.

Under the proposed abolition, he said, death row inmates would serve 30 years’ life imprisonment.