A man sentenced to hang in Singapore for possession of cannabis got a stay of execution, thanks to a chance encounter and a tattoo of a pet hamster.
The improbable story, reported on Vice, began back in 2015, when two men involved in a suspected drug deal, were caught with close to 2kg of cannabis.
During his trial, the man on the receiving end of the transaction, Raj Kumar Aiyachami, maintained his innocence, claiming that he had ordered a kind of chemically-sprayed tobacco called “butterfly,” known to only mimic the effects of cannabis, but ended up with the weed instead.
The judge didn’t buy his story, and was handed the death sentence. The second suspect, Ramadass Punnusamy, got life imprisonment along with 15 strokes of the cane.
However, in what the court called a “remarkable coincidence,” Raj’s testimony about receiving the wrong package was corroborated by fellow inmate Mark Kalaivanan Tamilarasan, with whom he shared an hour of prison yard time each day for a month in 2017. During one conversation in the yard, in which Raj told Mark about his arrest, Mark said that he was in the same location on the same day to collect “ganja,” but got a bag of “butterfly” by accident.
Mark remembered Sept. 21—the date of the alleged mixup—so vividly because his pet hamster Patrick had died that evening, and had the words “RIP 21.9.15 PAT” tattooed on his left middle finger.
The judge overturned the conviction, contending that Mark “was effectively implicating himself in a very serious offense, that he had not been investigated for or charged with.”
“He had much to lose and seemingly nothing to gain in doing this, if it was all false,” the judge explained.