Clemency
2 Nov
Within weeks, in the truest display of cold-hearted Singaporean efficiency, a 25 year old Australian-Vietnamese man will be hanged. Yes, _hanged._ Is it cheaper to hang someone than to rehabilitate, or keep around in jail for a year? We don’t shoot people here. We just go one little step up and hang them.
Nguyen, at 25, was born in the same year as my brother, whom I love dearly. I can only imagine how much closer he is to his own twin, whom he was purportedly trying to help. If my brother had chalked up debts from a Vietnamese gang in Melbourne, I would do _anything_, believe me.
It doesn’t in any way vindicate him for his folly in bringing .396kg of heroin to Singapore, even if it was just for a stopover (my goodness, he should have taken the road to Bangkok, then flown to Australia from there). Yet there is something fundamentally wrong about the death penalty; and even more when we, as a small city-state, are trigger/noose-happy in executing the number of people per capita that we do.
Drugs are wrong. Trafficking drugs is wrong. There is no way a state-sanctioned murder can be right, either, even if you were to suppose this were performed in the deterrence of the possible deaths this person’s act may have possibly caused. In all my optimism I am hoping the bureaucracy and its proponents will see the situation as we all do: not as a matter of absolute rights and wrongs, not as a matter of a white nation seeking extra-territorial gains, but as a matter of flesh and blood and basic human dignity.
“Stop Hanging”:http://stophanging.com/.
