Cheong Chun Yin

Cheong Chun Yin (张俊炎 Zhāng Jùnyán; born 7 September 1984) is a Malaysian and former death row convict who is currently serving a life sentence in Singapore for drug trafficking.

Born on 7 September 1984, Cheong Chun Yin was the eldest child and son out of four children - two sons and two daughters - in his family.

He was born in Perak, Malaysia.

Cheong and his family moved to Johor Bahru, where Cheong grew up and went to school.

Cheong completed his primary and secondary school education, and at age 17, he graduated and thus started working with his father, making a living by selling legitimate and pirated DVDs at a stall.

Of all the four children, Cheong was his father’s most favourite child, and the closest to him.

She said that a man called Teng Mor, whom she owed money since the 1990s, told her to help him deliver some valuables, which consisted of jade, blue sapphire, red ruby, diamonds and also Buddha pendants in a luggage (which she received from a Malay friend of Teng Mor), and she should be paid $5,000 for the job.

She made a cursory check but could not find them.

Nonetheless, she did not report to Teng Mor that the articles she was told to deliver were not in the suitcases, which happened to contain the heroin she was alleged to have delivered.

After this, she was told by Teng Mor to meet up with Cheong, which led to their meeting at the airport and by then, Pang was already under the surveillance of the narcotics officers and this surveillance also contributed to her arrest, as well as Cheong's.

In 2002, Cheong’s father Cheong Kah Pin (张家平 Zhāng Jiāpíng) and his wife divorced, and Cheong and his only brother (the fourth and youngest child) lived with his father while the daughters’ custody rights were given to Cheong’s mother.

Eventually, Cheong Chun Yin became the only one out of his four siblings to remain with their father.

Since young, Cheong wanted to become a policeman, but it was due to his family’s break-up which led to Cheong unable to fulfill his dream, and this may have also influenced him to trafficking drugs.

Cheong stated in his testimony that he, in 2006, first met one of his regular customers named Lau De at his Malaysia’s disc stall.

After knowing Lau De for two to three months, Cheong enquired about his line of business and even asked Lau De if there was any quick way to make money.

Lau De replied that he was engaged in smuggling gold bars, thereby evading taxes.

Cheong said that he did not believe Lau De at that time, thinking it would not be so easy to carry out such illegal activities.

Cheong and a female accomplice were both convicted of trafficking of 2,726g of heroin into Singapore from Myanmar in 2008, and sentenced to death by hanging in 2010.

Cheong submitted multiple unsuccessful appeals against his sentence; his case, similar to Yong Vui Kong's, received much attention in the media, at a time when activists argued for Singapore to abolish the death penalty.

On 16 June 2008, 24-year-old Cheong Chun Yin was arrested by the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) at Arab Street in Singapore, after the police received information that he allegedly passed a bag containing heroin to another person.

Cheong was thus charged with drug trafficking.

Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, should one trafficked at least 15g of heroin, he/she will face the death penalty in Singapore.

At the same time, Cheong’s 54-year-old accomplice Pang Siew Fum (彭秀芳 Péng Xiùfāng), a Malaysian, was captured in Toa Payoh, after Cheong passed to her a bag which contained around 2.726 kg of diamorphine at Changi Airport after he arrived in Singapore from Myanmar.

There were also 5 kg of heroin found packed in two more bags inside Pang's HDB flat at Toa Payoh, where she and her Singaporean husband Chow Yoke Jee lived.

Cheong and Pang were later brought to trial together in the High Court of Singapore before one of its judges Choo Han Teck.

Pang was represented by prominent lawyer Subhas Anandan and his two associates Irving Choh and Lim Bee Li, while Cheong was represented by both Ramesh Tiwary and Adrian Chong in his defence.

Later, after Lau De introduced to him a friend, who was decked in gold accessories, when he patronise his stall in March 2008, Cheong believed that Lau De was a gold smuggler and he thus accepted an offer to smuggle gold from Lau De two months later, which led to him travelling to Myanmar and later to Singapore where he received a bag from a middleman.

The bag, Cheong said, was checked by him but he did not find drugs and only felt something hard in its interior sides and thus assumed they were gold.

For this, the lawyers of Cheong argued that Cheong had no knowledge of the drugs and thus he should not be held liable to drug trafficking charges based on the presumption that he knew he was carrying drugs.

Pang, who worked as an assistant at her sister’s pork stall in Malaysia and also engaged in illegal booking, gave a similar account, in which she said she thought she was transporting valuables like penchants but not drugs.

On 4 February 2010, Justice Choo Han Teck found both Pang and Cheong guilty of drug trafficking.

In a short, two-page written verdict, Justice Choo stated that both may argue that they did not know they were carrying drugs and assumed they were carrying valuables, but it was not believable from both Pang and Cheong’s accounts and claims.

There was no alarm raised about the possibility of the bags not containing their intended contents when they checked and they could not have not noticed the drugs contained in the baggage if they were really unaware of drugs being present.

It was likely that both of them were wilfully blind and told lies about not noticing they were carrying heroin, and thus they should be guilty of drug trafficking.

In Cheong’s case, while he did provide details of the man “Lau De”, it was immaterial that the CNB did not make adequate efforts to trace “Lau De” or check on his cell-phones.

Upon their conviction for drug trafficking, both Cheong and Pang were sentenced to death.

Their appeals to the Court of Appeal of Singapore were later dismissed in November that same year.

When changes to the law allowed the courts in 2013 to give out life sentences to drug convicts who were only acting as drug mules or suffering from mental illnesses, Cheong applied for re-sentencing.

As he was not certified as a drug courier, Cheong initially became ineligible for re-sentencing and tried to fight for certification as a courier, until finally, due to new information received, Cheong's case was reviewed and he was finally acknowledged and certified as a courier, which allowed Cheong's death sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment with 15 strokes of the cane in April 2015.

Similarly, Cheong's accomplice, who suffered from depression at the time of the offence, was also re-sentenced to life in prison after her death sentence was set aside by the courts.