Adding to the pity was the fact that Hor's chief points were truly salient and our society can benefit from a wider discussion of them. Hence, I intend to convey to a wider public some of his main points through this column, with additional elements of my own.

Hor began by quoting from a recent speech made by Singapore's ambassador to the United Nations, Vanu Gopala Menon (picture at right), objecting to a draft resolution introduced in the international body against the death penalty. [2]

Menon said the draft resolution, tabled by EU countries, would be "divisive", going on to point out: "My delegation would like to remind this committee that capital punishment is not prohibited under international law. Yet it is clear that the sponsors of this draft resolution have decided that there can only be one view on capital punishment, and that only one set of choices should be respected."

For a large number of countries, including Singapore, the application of the death penalty is first and foremost a criminal justice issue, not a human rights issue, he argued.

"It is an important component of the administration of law and our justice system, and is imposed only for the most serious crimes and serves as a deterrent. We have proper legal safeguards in place to prevent any miscarriage of justice."

Note the use of the word "deterrent". We'll come back to this later.

"Every state has the sovereign right to choose its own political, economic, social and legal systems based on what is in their own best interests," he said.

As you can see, the ambassador anchored his position on national sovereignty. This reflects Singapore's tendency to see any criticism of the death penalty as an attempt by foreigners to interfere in our domestic affairs, to impose their ideas on us. You would have noted his snide remark that the EU thinks that "only one set of choices should be respected".

This prickly response shows how our government instinctively adopts a siege mentality once 'death penalty' is mentioned.

Unfortunately, this mentality is amplified each time the foreign media selectively cover cases of foreigners on death row, which is unfortunate in the slant that it gives to the issue. On the other hand, perhaps half a loaf is better than none. If the foreign media didn't cover (some) death row cases, the issue wouldn't be covered at all, since our domestic media have still not been freed from their leash.

Hor noted from his own interactions with Europeans and others that there is a genuine horror at the idea of capital punishment. Their sense of moral horror is something that Singaporeans (due to the silence of our own media on the subject?) do not appreciate. We completely misconstrue where others are coming from if we can't grasp the intensity of their feelings on the issue: It's not merely a case of 'them' telling us what to do, but that it evokes disgust and we are seen as barbaric. This blindness or deafness on our part can handicap our chances of being accepted by the global community in other fields, e.g. economics, without our even being aware of it.

The siege mentality shows up in other ways too. For a government that prides itself on transparency, Singapore's is famously secretive about death row statistics[3]. Nobody can obtain any detailed information from the government. The nearest one gets is when a member of parliament asks a question following an international outcry over Singapore having the highest per capita number of executions in the world. But even then, the minister's reply is hardly comprehensive.

What are they trying to hide?

Another area where information is lacking is justification for their repeated assertions that the death penalty deters. Hor noted that studies in other countries and cross-nationally have been unable to find any conclusive answer to this question, yet the Singapore government continues to assert so.

For example, Indranee Rajah, a member of parliament from the government benches, recently said, "... it always amazes me that when people point to Great Britain and Europe and they talk about the doing away of the death penalty, they never, in the same breath, also talk about their crime rates. They should compare the crime rates in Great Britain and the crime rates of countries in Europe, with the crime rates in Singapore, crime for crime. I think it cannot be disputed that the crime rates in Europe are higher than ours and that the incidences of violent crimes are much more than ours." [4]

However, if you googled for "WHO report on violence and health, 2002", you would find within that large report a table (on page 308) for homicide rates with these numbers: [5]

 
The rate (per 100,000) for male homicide in 13 out of 16 West European countries is lower than in Singapore.

I've just used male homicide as but one example to show you how Indranee's confident assertion that the crime rates in Europe are higher than Singapore's, crime for crime, looks pretty suspect.

As Hor put it, the Singapore government is "strong on assertion, but low on research and justification."

 
* * * * *

UN Ambassador Menon's speech was also interesting for the two concessions that he, on behalf of the Singapore government, made. Firstly, capital punishment should only be for the "most serious crimes", and secondly, there must be due process "to prevent any miscarriage of justice."

But does Singapore even live up to these?

Michael Hor asked the question: Does trafficking in 15 grams of heroin count as a "serious crime"? Or 500 grams of marijuana?

However, he reserved his main firepower for the issue of due process, pointing out the many ways in which people are sentenced to death with very troubling doubts.

Firstly, when the death sentence is mandatory and the judge cannot tailor the punishment to suit the circumstances and the person's role in them, is due process satisfied?

Secondly, it's problematic how "common intention" is enough to bring on the death penalty. Hor mentioned two recent cases, Lee Chez Kee vs PP and Tan Kiam Peng vs PP, to illustrate the issue. A group of persons set out to commit a crime, in the course of which the victim is killed by one member of the group. In Singapore law, the others are equally guilty of murder though they never planned to do so, and even in the course of the commission of the crime, had no intention to do so. Is the (mandatory) death penalty just?

Thirdly, in cases of murder, the defence of insanity seems almost never to succeed. For this defence, psychiatrists' testimony is involved. Hor noted that in almost every case in recent decades, the judge has preferred the prosecution's expert witness over the defence's, finding the defendants of sound mind [6]. Does this steamroller pattern indicate a bias in the process?

Fourthly, presumption is a serious flaw. It reverses the burden of proof onto the defendant, basically saying that he is guilty until he can prove his innocence. Michael Hor put it very starkly when he pointed out the effect of presumption: Even when there is reasonable doubt whether the accused is guilty or not, he would still hang.

This violates a tenet of fundamental justice, as can be seen in Article 67 (1) (i) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court [7], which says, 

(i) Not to have imposed on him or her any reversal of the burden of proof or any onus of rebuttal. 

Fifth and related to presumption, there is the problem of negligence as equal culpability. The young Nigerian Tochi was executed even when, as one judge in the Court of Appeal noted, there was no direct evidence that he ever knew he had heroin in his bags on arrival at Singapore airport. However, the Court held that he should have known; he had been negligent in not checking the packets' contents. The bottom line is: Negligence is enough for you to lose your life.

What happened to the important requirement of proving mens rea, i.e. intent?

Do we really have the "proper safeguards" that Menon told the UN we have?

We as a society are not facing up to the troubling moral and judicial issues our love affair with capital punishment entails. Whether or not we share the moral horror that Europeans feel about taking another life, there are still plenty of issues that can and should be examined. As Michael Hor pointed out, the so-called justification of deterrence is extremely weak while the issues of proportionality (mandatory death sentence) and the consequences of relying on presumption cry out for reflection.

Personally, i would ask whether our deep resistance to abolition, our 'siege mentality' response to any talk about this subject, might even be a crime itself. Lives are taken away simply because of our sheer bloody pride.

© Yawning Bread