Inevitable that Australian will Die

Just as it is inevitable that I will weigh into this controversy.

For those of you who are unaware, a Melbourne man of Vietnamese extraction is facing the noose in Singapore, for drug trafficing. He was not attempting to bring drugs into Singapore, he was simply passing through en route from Cambodia to Australia.

Now, Singapore is one of the most if not the most enthusiastic (per capita) neck-breakers in the world, and like Texas, it's practically impossible to get a reprieve once the appeals process is exhausted. Unlike Texas, the appeals process takes a couple of months, rather than a decade or more. His mother's latest ploy to secure a reprieve has been to write to Her Majesty the Queen. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of reprieves granted by the President of Singapore in the last few decades. I doubt a plea from the Queen could save Prince Harry from the noose, but full marks for trying.

Don't get me wrong, on balance, I'm against stringing people up for drugs charges. Just as I'm against the shari'ah that bans Cabernet Sauvignon throughout most of the Middle East (actually, perhaps if they had a tipple now and then, violent jihaad would be less the rage. Just a theory; but I digress). Were I to get caught in the Magical Kingdom "experimenting" with a good bottle of Australian red, or even a beer, I know that I would be in a world of trouble and I would have no-one to blame but myself. Incidentally, I'm well aware (before someone accuses me otherwise) that draconian Singaporean punishments like caning people bloody and breaking their necks are hang-overs from English Common Law, and have no basis in Islam.

Asad Latif argues on the basis of reasons of sovereignity and international comity, that the calls for Nguyen Tuong Van's reprieve are misguided. That is true, particularly when such calls are based upon his nationality, or the fact that the drugs were not destined for the Singaporean market. Such arguments either value Singaporean lives less than Australian ones, or they value them more. That's a fair point.

Nguyen Tuong Van's legal team, unlike some Amnesty International types, have based their appeals for clemancy on bases that might at least some chance of success. They argue that their client is able to give evidence against others in the drug trade. Of course, that will almost inevitably lead to more hangings. One would expect that to carry some weight with the notoriously authoritarian Singapore government. Naturally Amnesty International and others opposed to the noose on principle run a mile from that sort of argument!

Now, like Justice Scalia, I have no moral or religious objection to the death penalty; and unlike some enthusiastic opponents thereof, I can say with a clear conscience, that, for example, the Nurnburg Judgments were on the whole just (except, for example, to the extent that the indictments were based upon attrocities actually committed by the Red Army, but falsely blamed on the Nazis, such as the Katyn massacre). But that cannot excuse Auschwitz and Treblinka. I think the same about Israel's hanging of Eichmann; nor would I have shed any tears if Arafat ended up at the end of a rope instead of in a (no-doubt luxurious) French hospital.

Anyway, this biographical piece on the front page of last Friday's Australian, complete with semi-naked photo that could turn Andrew Sullivan straight, strikes me as ghoulish. Apparrently, he's a really nice chap. I won't re-print the photo, or excerpt from the story. Readers can satisfy their morbid curiousity by reading all about Mr Singh's life and his work at The Australian. But Mr Singh is credited with being the only executioner in the world to single-handedly hang 18 men in one day - three at a time. In his favour, he's tried to quit, and uses the British long-drop method of hanging, which almost invariably results in instant death.

Anyway, if The Australian can be ghoulish, so can David. Here's a picture of the gallows in my home town, last used in 1964, to hang a particularly nasty piece of work called Glen Sabre Valance, for shooting his boss, and raping his boss's wife amongst her husband's remains. Like I said; a nasty piece of work.