It is particularly distressing to me that Singapore is one of the black spots on the world map for this. An article by Amy Tan of Reuters, 'Singapore death penalty shrouded in silence' said,

The government revealed recently, only in reply to a question in parliament, that 340 people were hanged between 1991 and 2000.

In a response to a Reuters query, it also said 22 people were executed for drug trafficking in 2001 and 17 in the year before.

Singapore has one of the highest execution rates in the world relative to its population, Amnesty [International]'s Parritt said.

-- Reuters 12 April 2002

 
Whenever this charge of being too quick with the noose is levelled at the government, they always say capital punishment works. It has deterrence value. Yet if they are so proud of doing the right and effective thing, it strikes me as strange how much they wish to hide it.

The same report by Reuters said,

"We do have a general policy not to give any information on the death penalty," a prison official told Reuters.

 
As you can see in the sidebar, the identity of the hangman was also supposed to be a secret until an Australian news organisation found him.

Now, before we discuss the claimed deterrence value of judicial murder, an important facet of the Singapore case must be made plain. An estimated 70% of death sentences are given out not for murder, but for drug trafficking, which means the retributive arguments for capital punishment -- a life for a life -- do not apply. This must be borne in mind in the discussion to follow.

The death sentence is mandatory -- that is, the judges have no discretion to reduce the sentence -- if the accused is found trafficking in more than 15 grams of heroin, or the equivalent of heroin. Hence, 30 grams of cocaine would also get you the death sentence. We have had this law since 1975.

The prosecutor does not have to prove that you were trafficking. He only needs to prove possession, and the law makes the presumption that you're trafficking.

The theory -- I stress, theory -- is that harsh punishment deters. It is a very attractive theory, especially to simple minds. But if one did a search of the literature, one would find that no one has been able to demonstrate conclusively that it does. In fact, many studies point otherwise, albeit that these often use homicide as the crime to be considered. In my quick search, I couldn't find any studies about the deterrence value of capital punishment to drug trafficking, which only underlines how much of an outlier Singapore is, that here, most of the people we hang are in this category.

Here are some simple facts from www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=12&did=167#STUDIES

U.S. Murder Rate Greatly Exceeds European Non-Death Penalty Nations 
Data released by the British Home Office reveals that the United States, which retains the death penalty, has a murder rate that is more than three times that of many of its European allies that have banned capital punishment. (New York Times, May 11, 2002). The data challenges the argument that the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. There are more than 110 nations around the world that have banned the death penalty in law or practice.

Homicide Rates Fall in Canada After Abolition of Death Penalty 
The abolition of the death penalty in Canada in 1976 has not led to increased homicide rates. Statistics Canada reports that the number of homicides in Canada in 2001 (554) was 23% lower than the number of homicides in 1975 (721), the year before the death penalty was abolished. In addition, homicide rates in Canada are generally three times lower than homicide rates in the U.S., which uses the death penalty. For example, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the homicide rate in the U.S. in 1999 was 5.7 per 100,000 population and the rate in Canada was only 1.8. Canada currently sentences those convicted of murder to life sentences with parole eligibility. (Issues Direct.com, 8/4/02).

 
And then, even within the United States,

South Has Highest Murder Rate in 2001 

REGION MURDER RATE PER 100,000 PEOPLE
Northeast	4.2
Midwest	5.3
West	5.5
South	6.7
National	5.6
-- Crime in the United States, 2001

According to data released on October 28 as part of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2001, the South again has the highest murder rate of the four regions in the United States. The South was also the only region above the national average. In 2001, almost 80% of executions in the country occurred in the South. The report noted that the Texas crime rate rose 4% in 2001, nearly five times the national average, and the state posted a 7.6% increase in homicides. At the same time, the total number of executions in Texas is more than three times that of any other state in the nation. The Northeast, the region with the lowest murder rate, had no executions in 2001. (See DPIC's Execution Statistics, Crime in the United States, 2001, New York Times and Houston Chronicle, October 29, 2002)

Most observers believe that criminals are more deterred by the perceived risk of getting caught than the harshness of the penalty. No matter how severe the punishment prescribed, if the chance of being caught is low, there will be people attempting to commit the crime.

Example: why do you think people litter? You have littered, I have littered. Be honest, now. Was it because we pondered the penalty and decided it was too lenient, or because we looked around, didn't think there'd be anyone to catch us, and so we took the easy way out rather than look for a bin?

On the other hand, if the chance of getting caught is high, it doesn't take a hanging to deter people. All it takes is a reasonably stiff sentence.

OK, you may still dispute that, but even so, the question is, should the State be meting out capital punishment in the absence of proof that it works? Why does the State persist in this method and put the burden of proof on abolitionists?

It should be the other way around. Precisely because capital punishment raises troubling moral questions, it should be avoided unless there is proof that it brings such overwhelming efficacy as to override moral objections.

In other words, when there is doubt, desist.

There are any number of moral objections to retribution; I don't have to cover them, for they are easily found on the internet. What I want to do is to point out again that in the Singapore case, we're in the main NOT talking about murder.

Arguing retributive value for drug trafficking is quite a stretch. The simple guy will say, drugs kill people, so hang the bugger. For instance, in the online forum of ChannelNewsAsia, someone with the nick Picaso wrote on 25 Oct 2005,

A closer look will show fuzziness in logic. What about people who manufacture and market tobacco products? Alcohol? Sugary soft drinks that are strongly associated with rising diabetes trends? People die of diabetes, in case you didn't know.

Well, and what about people who, knowing they are HIV-positive, still have unprotected sex? Should they all hang? Some readers may wish to make a case for that, but please note, the government does not.

This is one more example, out of many in Singapore, where the government uses a reasoning selectively, yet many people fail to see the inconsistency.

(Be patient, this essay will get to Singapore politics soon enough)

But more important than that, the retributive argument weakens itself if applied to cases without personally identifiable victims, for a retributive argument is, in large part, one about emotional satisfaction for the direct victim. The more removed the argument is from direct and identifiable victims, the more it becomes mindless brutality passing off as righteous, if atavistic, revenge.

Sotto voce, there is the suspicion that the government resorts to capital punishment because it wants to avoid the cost of incarcerating someone for a long time. To be fair, the government has never made such an argument, at least not that I am aware of.

But Singaporeans see our government as a very money-minded one. Dollars and cents make all kinds of decisions, overriding moral objections too. The recent decision to build two casinos despite strong opposition from some quarters on moral grounds, testifies to this attribute. It would therefore be entirely consistent with the known character of our government if the cost factor lay somewhere in the attraction of capital punishment.

Of course, it would be a hideously repulsive argument. It would resemble Hitler's Final Solution.

Even as we are internationally notorious for hanging people, there is almost no intelligent debate in Singapore about the death penalty. The government takes this silence to indicate broad support for such laws.

No, let me rephrase that: the government uses this silence to claim broad support for such laws.

This silence is not a natural state of affairs. It is a result of media control. Our media will not accommodate a debate about the death penalty, because they know the government does not want their laws challenged.

In Singapore, debate is often seen as dissidence and subversion, a habit common to all authoritarian regimes.

In the absence of an informed debate, citizens indeed harbour views in support of capital punishment, but these are the views of the uninformed. Above, I quoted picaso as an example of the kind of stuff they write when the topic rears up in an online forum.

Here are other comments by pro-capital punishment writers in the same online forum:

By repora, 24 Oct 2005 
you seem to forget that drugs is a real social problem and the West cannot handle it so they refuse to acknowledge the repercussions in drug addicts, druglords, drug money, drug problems ... family lives are destroyed forever.

This is another version of the 'West is decadent and bad, East is moral and good' self-delusion. He forgets the epidemic of drug abuse in Thailand and Yunnan, despite putting bullets into the heads of one drug trafficker after another.

By rwes, 25 Oct 2005
Drugs trader must face the Capital punishment without compromise, is USA not a well established country.? Do they still apply capital punishment , to kill one drug trader,is better than to destroy of thousands of our country folks, Spore Government must stand firm to apply in regardless of what others comments.

Defensive nationalism mixed with deference to America. On the one hand urging readers to stand firm against comments from foreigners, at the same time appealing to the example of the "well-established" USA. Since this leading country of the world has capital punishment, it must be right. And 'West is bad, East is good' is turned on its head.

By RChong, 26 Oct 2005
I don't think there's capital punishment in Australia, correct me if I am wrong. What's the reason? Is it because Australia has plenty of land to keep these guys in the prison or is it because of tradition that convicts have been welcome in the past to serve their sentence in Australia as directed by the motherland ie England?

I don't think any comment from me is necessary.

By repora, 26 Oct 2005
Do you think that a life sentence in prison where you get gang rapes and have to eat xlime each day for the rest of your unproductive life is more humane than death? Believe me, death is the easy option.

Hollywood picture of prison life. Confusing the individual's possible wish to end it all, with the State ending it all for him.

By PL, 28 Oct 2005 
It is not a deterrent though most argument would state so. It is just a law to protect the society of this country. It is a clear indcation that Drug offenders will not stop even if there is a Capital Punishment...what makes one feel that removing such punishment will help to reduce drug offences ? It is thus to be viewed as a law to protect the society of this country and not as much a deterrent.

He says capital punishment has no deterrence value, and in the next sentence, he says it's to protect society. Huh? Also, he has added the red herring about abolition reducing drug offences.

 
In contrast, in the online forum of ChannelNewsAsia, drampage argued cogently for abolition. Use the hyperlink to see what he wrote (though I don't know how long it will be kept online).

Viewed from a distance, it's not really a debate at all. The pro-death penalty side either makes poorly-founded claims or simplistic assumptions. But there is no better kind of debate, because the mainstream media avoid this issue for fear of displeasing the government. Singaporeans remain uninformed.

That's just jolly for our government of course. One less issue to grapple with. And why not? They're giving Singaporeans, with their paleolithic notions of justice, exactly what they want.

Yet it inflicts serious damage on Brand Singapore. We give cause for global public opinion to think less of us. And as the Warwick University fiasco showed, a bad reputation translates to real losses. Warwick cited the death penalty as an indicator of the kind of political climate that made them think twice about investing in Singapore. Worse, and to be precise, it's not that there was the death penalty, but that there was not even debate about it in Singapore. Warwick was concerned that, seeing even debate was frowned upon, this indicated constraints on speech and academic freedom.

In a commentary published 25 October 2005 in The Age, journalist Mark Baker urged Australians to "boycott Singapore-owned companies such as Optus and Singapore Airlines, they can take their shopping holidays elsewhere, they can protest against the thousands of Singapore military who train on Australian soil and they can start flying to Europe via Bangkok "

This was in reaction to the death sentence handed to Nguyen Van Tuong from Melbourne.

To survive, we are constantly told we depend on being plugged into the wider world. Our businesses increasing have exposure to many other countries. Singapore Airlines is trying very hard to get traffic rights between Australia and the United States. All these depend on goodwill. In a myriad ways, we pay a price for thumbing our noses at global public opinion.

Authoritarianism, media control and a paranoid fear that debate means subversion are what has brought us into such a stinking hole. If we had permitted free debate for the last 10 - 20 years, perhaps public opinion would have shifted by now from the uncivilised to the somewhat more enlightened. Perhaps we would have suspended the use of capital punishment and not suffered for our bad rap.

The truly sorry thing is, it's not as if we benefit from hanging people. It's not as if we'd automatically suffer more criminal activity if we stopped hanging people, as studies about (the absence of) deterrence have shown.

It's just false pride.

© Yawning Bread