There are only three occasions when the decisions of the Singapore judiciary make the headlines of the international press. The three occasions are:
- 1. When one of our senior politicians sues someone for defamation
and inevitably wins a lot of money;
- 2. When we either cane or hang a citizen of a Western
country and end up in a diplomatic row, which inevitably makes us more popular
with certain segments of population in the Western country; and
- 3. When lots of money of a foreign government is involved.
So, it was a pleasant surprise
to find that we made the international new for doing something different. As
reported in the Guardian, we decided to stay the execution of a man whose
intelligence can only be politely described as “slow,” (It is undisputed that Mr.
Nagaenthran
Dharmalingam, who is due to hang has an IQ of 69. The IQ of an average person
is 100. He is by definition as person of below average intelligence). The story
can be found below:
Given that executions for drug crimes are never stayed, the
very act of staying the execution was considered an act of “divine” intervention.
As was expressed by Mr. M. Ravi, the lawyer for Mr. Dharmalingam on his personal
Facebook page:
Taken from the Facebook page of Mr. M. Ravi
Given the fact that this is a drug case of a Malaysian
Tamil who has been proven to be a person of low intelligence, I’m going to state
that this is probably the biggest exercise in false hop. As Ms. Kirstin Han
states on her Facebook page:
Taken from the Facebook page of Ms. Kirstin Han
A lot has been said about this impending execution, which I
shall leave to the better qualified. I will, however, state that the powers
that be were depressingly predictable. Whilst it is an undisputed fact that Mr.
Dharmalingam is “slow,” the judges decided that whilst slow, he definitely knew
the consequences of his actions and therefore the capable of weighing up the
consequences of his actions.
The Ministry of Home Affairs also went out of its way to
issue a statement to say that they had given Mr. Dharmalingam due process:
Whilst these reactions were predictable, there was a
disturbing article in Today, which made it sound like Mr. Dharmalingam was
actually Machiavellian in his claims to be “stupid.”
The official answer to why the powers that be are now so
keen to hang Mr. Dharmalingam is that “Singapore has a zero tolerance to drug
trafficking.” Everyone who enters Singapore is warned that the penalty for drug
trafficking is hanging and because we are so strict, nobody in their right mind
wants to smuggle drugs into Singapore. The official argument is that “hanging”
is a “deterrent.” As sad and traumatic as Mr. Dharmalingam’s impending
execution is for his family and the group of activists who have been fighting
to save his life over the last decade is, “we” need to send a message to the
world that anyone bringing a certain number of drugs into the country will
enjoy a one-way ticket to the gallows.
If one trawls the coffee shops, it would seem that this argument
is by and large accepted by the general population. In 2011, when we executed Van
Tuong Nguyen, an Australian citizen of Vietnamese decent (and the last person
who caused a diplomatic row with a Western country), I had friends who remarked
that this just highlighted the different attitudes towards drugs in Asian and
Western societies. The standard Singaporean reply is that our streets are drug
free when compared to a good many places in the Western world.
Whilst this argument is generally accepted, we have to ask
ourselves if the death penalty is really a deterrent and if it a deterrent, how
effective is it really?
On the surface of things, one could say that there is an
argument that our strategy is working. In the 21-year that I’ve lived in
Singapore (including visiting the dubious areas), it’s been damn near
impossible to get a bag of weed. By comparison, getting hold of drugs wasn’t an
issue when I lived in London. If you look at statistics, we do measure up
pretty well when compared to most places and there is also the point that the
death penalty for drug trafficking is not unique to Singapore and as the
Ministry of Home Affairs would point out – we do go through the due process –
there is no equivalent of Duterte’s war on drugs.
However, if you look closely enough, the picture is not as
rosy as one might imagine. Singapore has “drug abusers” and that figure has been
pretty steady over the 3,000 mark over a nine-year period:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1007331/dug-abuser-numbers-singapore/
Whilst the government celebrated a fall in the number of
drug abusers from 2019 to 2020, it found that many of the drug abusers were first
timers and young. Details can be found in the following report from the Straits
Times:
Let’s stress that the
statistics that we have are only for the ones who get arrested by the Central
Narcotics Bureau (CNB) and we have to account for the fact that there many more
drug users whom manage to fly under the radar of CNB.
Logic has it that our
annual 3,000 plus drug abusers must be getting their drugs from somewhere and
given that Singapore has made it clear that it is not about to liberalise drug
laws, one can only conclude that the drugs are coming through an illegal
source.
So, how is it that
drugs get into Singapore when there’s a death penalty to deter people from
wanting to get into the drug business? This argument assumes that people like
me (middle aged working professional with a family and house) might want to
enter the business. For someone like me, the cost of getting caught out weigh
whatever I could make from the business.
However, the guys who
enter the business and end up getting caught are not people like me. If you
look at the list of notable hangings from drug trafficking, the only person who
could be described as “working professional” or having “something to lose” were
he to get caught was Johannes Van Damme, a Dutch national who was working as an
engineer. The rest were from what you’d call desperate backgrounds. Here is a
list of the notable cases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singapore
The Ministry of Home
Affairs likes to point out that we need to be strict on drugs because our
status as a port city in the middle of region for the drug trade makes us vulnerable.
What it forgets to mention is that we’re in a region filled with desperate and
poor people who will take risk that the average Singaporean won’t consider in
order to feed their families.
I don’t disagree with the
principle of deterring drug pushing or any criminal activity for that matter. Whilst
the death penalty has to “deterred” certain people from entering the business, it
hasn’t actually done anything to eliminate the drug trade within Singapore or
to stop people from taking up a drug habit. There are people who are doing quite nicely
from our domestic drug trade and somehow avoiding that one-way ticket to the
gallows.
Sure, our numbers look
low compared to other places. However, Singapore is a small place that is
relatively easy to police. So, we must ask, are the “low” figures due to policing
or the death penalty?
Sure, the death penalty
is an opportunity for the powers that be to look tough on crime by killing off
the people that “don’t matter,” to anyone else other than a few activists and
their immediate families (specifically dark-skinned people from S***hole countries).
If we wanted to “deter”
drug trafficking and other lucrative criminal activities, we should perhaps consider
tightening up our enforcement on money laundering. Should we consider hanging light-skinned
bankers, lawyers and accountants for money laundering the way we hang dark-skinned
people from s**hole countries?
If you look at things
carefully enough, you’ll realise that instead of deterring drug dealers, it’s
actually made them cleverer about their business activities (don’t engage
violence and don’t be the guy carrying the stuff).
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