the court included: On 7 November, Judge T. S. Sinnathuray adjourned the trial for three days to consider his verdict. (Singapore abolished jury trials in 1969.) When the trial resumed, the judge was satisfied that the prosecution had made its case and dismissed Martin's version of events. He found Martin guilty and sentenced him to death. In his verdict, Justice Sinnathuray said: Execution Withdrawal of appeal On 15 November 1995, Martin announced he would appeal against the sentence. He later dropped the appeal without giving an explanation on 4 January 1996, four days before it was to have been heard. He turned down a subsequent chance to petition the President of Singapore for clemency, saying that he was impatient to be executed. Martin's final days and words In the days before his hanging, Martin wrote of an "emptiness" inside him and lamented that no one had loved him besides his family and his ex-wife María, in a series of misspelled notes (he was semi-literate): He complained that in prison, "You are told every day that you are not a member of the uman rase [a misspelling of 'human race']." The week before he was due to hang, he dreamed that he had avoided the sentence by committing suicide: Martin's mother remarked, "Whoever he is now, he's the person the prison service trained him to be. These bastards have no right to take my son's life. I brought him into the world. I am the only person who can take him out of it." However, no one formally protested against the hanging. The British government also decided to not submit a plea for clemency from the Singapore government. Four days before his execution, in an interview with criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee, Martin described in detail how he murdered Gerard Lowe and then dismembered his body. Last meal and hanging At dawn on 19 April 1996, after a last meal of pizza and hot chocolate, 36-year-old John Martin Scripps was hanged in Changi Prison together with two Singaporean drug traffickers. On that day, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Royal Thai Police closed their files on the murders of Sheila and Darin Damude, declaring the case effectively solved. When Martin's ex-wife María heard that he had been hanged, she said: At the time of his execution, Martin became the first Briton to be executed in Singapore since the nation's independence from British