he had been discriminated in terms of the prosecution's discretion to charge him with capital drug trafficking while the mastermind Chia Choon Leng, who was instead detained without trial for allegedly instigating Yong to traffic drugs. In referring to the Sim Min Teck appeal case, the Court of Appeal dismissed Yong's appeal for the lack of merit in his case, given that there was insufficient evidence to charge and convict Chia for the bigger role he played in Yong's crime, and they stated that the different treatment Chia received has no bearing in Yong's conviction, since there was sufficient evidence to convict Yong, and the prosecution had the legal right to proceed with different charges against two or persons who played different roles in the same crime. In the aftermath, the government passed laws to allow drug couriers to no longer face the death penalty and receive life imprisonment instead, and allowed the chance for inmates on death row to seek an approval for re-sentencing. As a result, Yong successfully applied for his death sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment and 15 strokes of the cane. In a 2001 drug case appeal, Thiruselvam Nagaratnam, a death row convict, argued that he was discriminated and subjected to unequal treatment since his accomplice Katheraven Gopal was convicted of reduced drug charges and sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment and 24 strokes of the cane. However the Court of Appeal, in upholding the principles laid by precedent cases including the appeal of Sim Min Teck, stated that there were overwhelming evidence against Thiruselvam to prove he played a larger role than Katheraven and thus it was fair for the prosecution to proceed with higher charges against him compared to Katheraven, and they rightly exercised their prerogative to proceed with different charges against the defendants charged in the same case for their respective roles in the crime. It was also the case study behind the prosecution’s prerogative to pursue different charges for multiple defendants of a single case in a 2013 law school journal by the Singapore Management University's Yong Pung How School of Law. Fates of Beh and Chng Beh, meanwhile, did not appeal his sentence, and he subsequently served his life term (equivalent to twenty years' jail) at Changi Prison. He was released in the present time and repatriated to Malaysia. As of today, the third and final accomplice, Chng Meng Joo,