The kidney reportedly came from Tan Chor Jin, who was hanged at dawn on Friday, 9 January 2009. While there is no formal confirmation of this, Tang received his kidney the same day. Kidney transplants are not everyday events.

According to the newspaper [1] , a family spokesman said that the donor had expressly designated Tang as the recipient of one of his kidneys, without confirming that Tan, the hanged prisoner, was the donor.

This explanation -- if true -- would get around quite a number of rules. To begin with, Tang was reportedly struck off the kidney waiting list last year -- a list managed by the Ministry of Health -- when he was fined S$17,000 and was jailed (for all of two hours) for attempting to buy a kidney from an Indonesian man. Even before that, he was nowhere near the top of the list, since he had diabetes and cardiac problems that would complicate his recovery and life expectancy. You wouldn't want to waste an organ on someone who is unlikely to make the best use of it, would you?

How is it then that Tang can jump a queue he was not in?

The family spokesman told the Straits Times that Tang Wee Sung and the donor did not know each other. Which only begs the question why the donor would nominate Tang.

Of course, just because two men did not know each other does not mean contact cannot be made through lawyers.

Even more interestingly, the newspaper reported: "At Tan's wake yesterday, both his wife, Madam Siau Fang Fang, and his elder brother, Mr Tan Chor Juay, said that they were not aware of Tan designating a recipient for his organs." This, even though they knew that Tan had agreed to donate his organs a few days prior to the hanging. [2] 

Then of course, there is the question of tissue match. Are directed donations allowed to ignore this?

Tan Chor Jin, nicknamed "One-Eyed Dragon" from his blind right eye, was convicted of the murder of murder Lim Hock Soon, a nightclub owner. Tan had burst into Lim's flat before dawn one morning, tied up his wife, daughter and housemaid and shot the victim six times in another room. Tan had a history of secret society connections and had a dispute with Lim over money.

Tang Wee Sung was for a long while the Executive Chairman of C.K.Tang Limited, a staunchly pro-Christian chain of departmental stores that has not done well for as long as I can remember. He was forced to quit in August 2008 when his end-stage renal failure became public knowledge. Shareholders were upset that the company was being led by an ailing man whose condition had hitherto been kept from them.

In July 2008, Tang was charged with attempting to purchase a kidney from a living donor, Sulaiman Damanik, who had been specially flown in from Galang, a village near Medan, Sumatra. Tang had agreed to pay about S$300,000 to intermediaries Wang Chin Sing and Whang Sung Lin (who were also charged and later convicted).

Of the S$300,000, only 150 million Indonesian Rupiah (about S$22,000 then) would have gone to Sulaiman. He was an unemployed man with a family to feed and elderly parents to take care of. According to news reports, 150 million Rupiah would represent some 16 years' labourer's wages.

As things turned out, Sulaiman was caught and convicted under HOTA. He had to serve two weeks in jail. And he never got paid.

By comparison, Tang was sentenced to just one day's imprisonment. In actual fact he spent just two hours in a lock-up. At the time, the leniency was said to be due to the fact that his medical condition was so grave, it would be life-threatening for him to spend more than two hours in internment.

But now that Tang has had a triple by-pass for heart condition with doctors certifying him fit enough to receive a transplant, and now that he has actually got a new kidney, that sentence -- and the reasoning behind it -- looks absurd. Shouldn't we revisit it and expect him to spend a fair amount of jail time?

The whole affair cries out for an investigation. In the public interest, in the interest of those waiting anxiously in the organ waiting list and losing out on the chance to move up one step, we need a better explanation of events leading up to this particular transplant.

It is not good enough for the Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan to say, "I think we leave it to the patient and the family of the late Mr Tan to confirm or refute whether there was this directed transplant. I think for patient privacy, I cannot comment more than that." [3]

Patient privacy may be a valid argument in certain circumstances, but not this one. Firstly, the recipient is someone who had a history of attempting to break the law making a private contract to purchase an organ and making false declarations towards that goal. Secondly, the state had shown leniency in sentencing on account of the man's health condition. Thirdly, the kidney came from a person who died at the hands of the state. One cannot wash one's hands of responsibility just like that.

This brings me to capital punishment again.

I am well aware that even a convicted prisoner is (theoretically) free to make his own decision regarding organ donation; that he is not obliged to donate anything at all. I trust (I hope) that whether we sentence someone to death or not, and when we carry out the execution is unrelated to the timing for another person's medical needs.

But as a society, we must be aware of the moral quagmire we are running into: As a result of capital punishment, there will be individuals among us who benefit from the killing of another person; who will be waiting eagerly for that person to die. We as a society enjoy that benefit too in having one fewer person on the dialysis machine. The state enjoys the benefit in having one fewer person to subsidise.

For all our moral qualms about paying living-donor transplants, evidenced by the heated debate last year over the proposal to amend HOTA, at least the theory is that the donor gets a real benefit in cash that might improve his life. Despite this, we feel troubled by the ethics and consequences of opening that floodgate.

And here we are killing people, even if they are gangsters with no remorse in life, and the minister does not signal that he intends to find out what actually happened and whether everything was honest and above-board.

Or do we want to reinforce the belief that in Singapore there is one law for the rich and another for the rest of us?

© Yawning Bread