Singapore executes Australian drug trafficker. I suppose this will bring about another round of anti-Singapore nonsense just like the time that American brat was caned for vandalism.
(CNN) — Singapore’s government hanged an Australian man for drug trafficking early Friday, hours after making an exception to prison policy by letting the condemned man’s mother hold her son’s hand one last time.
Van Nguyen was hanged at 6 a.m. (10 p.m. Thursday GMT) as a dozen friends and supporters, dressed in black, kept an overnight vigil outside the maximum-security prison. His twin brother, Nguyen Khoa, was dressed in white.
“The sentence was carried out this morning at Changi Prison,” Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry said in a statement. The statement said Nguyen had failed in his appeals to the Court of Appeal, and to President S.R. Nathan for clemency.
As much as I dislike how politics work in Singapore, I am 100% supportive of its criminal laws. Our lack of democracy has nothing to do with our efficient justice system. Having capital and corporal punishments does not make us barbarians, it just keeps our streets safe. And how are we supposed to prevent drug traffickers from taking over this international port city if any random foreign criminal can escape justice just by requesting for extradition?
Please don’t give me that “but capital punishment solves nothing!” shit. The most important purpose of capital punishment is, despite its name, neither punishment nor deterrance, but to remove a dangerous element from society. Arguably, life sentence does the same thing, but life sentence isn’t exactly more “humane”. So you lock the person up for the rest of his life and he’s going to die anyway? Thinking that it’s somehow more humane than capital punishment is just pure idealistic fluff. Not to mention that from a practical viewpoint the government spends our tax money feeding those life sentence convicts.
Don’t give me that “what if it was your son?” shit either. Yeah well, what if it was your son who died of drug overdose? What if it was your son who was murdered? If criminals don’t want to die, they can feel free to take their life-ruining drugs and move to a more “civilized” country. I heard that most parts of America will gladly accept them. There is a reason why planes flying into Singapore warn the passengers about our death sentence for drug trafficking. Some people just can’t take the hint.
Pragmatism over idealism. I will gladly be a “barbarian” than worry about getting mugged in some backalley. I will gladly be a “barbarian” than worry about someone breaking into my house and murdering my family. I will gladly be a “barbarian” than live in a place where I cannot feel safe.
Hang the bastards I say!
I am Australian and I really am a little annoyed by all of this. How many more Australians are going to be in the headlines for drug charges !? One was sentenced to 15 years jail in Indonesia (which caused a bigger furore here), this case and just 2 days ago, another was caught with heroin in Mauritius.
The politicians are just using this for their own purposes and the media is hyping it up to sell more papers.
Shouldn’t we start to learn from such tragedies.
At least he is a changed man, or so the reports say. I hope he made his peace with God before going.
I fully agree wit u. well said indeed!
Well..being an Australian also, though I had much sympathy for the hanged man, but…I agree with DM’s point of view. He should be aware of Singapore’s strict criminal laws, he knew the risks and still dive into it.
Atleast he realised his mistake before being hanged, I think..0.0a
Ah well, just my humble little opinion.
“Atleast he realised his mistake before being hanged”
What kind of BS is that! He knew the risk, would he have realised his mistake when he didn’t get caught?
I am with you, hang the basterd!
completely agree !
Justice & Law shouldn’t mixed with other factor, ie politics . humanity or other things… since it will corrupt the justice and law …
singapore & malaysia really have strong law , as you can see country with strong law make the country itself save from crime
Singapore is a wonderful place, but some countries are able to maintain order without murdering people who break laws. Of course, in the US people are executed and you’re still not safe on some streets. Europe and Canada are rather more “civilized,” at least in this respect.
I’m not saying Singapore doesn’t have the right to do it, or to cane foreign delinquents (which seemed vicious but fair). But these are ugly things that tally too well with the Chinese tradition of regarding the state as much more important than the individual. This principle is closer to fascism than to democracy.
Well here’s hoping that your police don’t strip detainees and make them do squats. Malaysia’s strong laws didn’t make that woman safe from Malaysia’s own police. And that minister should be sacked as he doesn’t really care.
Anyway, Darwin Award, anyone? I don’t want to be cold, but this guy knowingly tried this stunt to pay off his brother’s legal fees, and his brother was a heroin addict. The irony. Blood is thicker than water, but come on! Go into (legitimate) business and work hard. It beats rotting for 3 years and then hanged.
There’s something to be said for lifetime imprisonment, though. Some victims and/or their families would gladly pay to lock up a criminal and have them rot in prison till they die. Just don’t give them TV or take them to theme parks like we do here in Canada. Lock them up, solitary confinement if necessary, and break their will by inflicting silence upon them. If they go insane, maybe you can give them the needle, or the rope, or the switch, whatever, because then you’ll have won. Death penalty is sometimes just an easy way out. With life sentences, people will be begging to die. For some very, very angry families out there, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Regarding the state vs individual thing, once again I find it hard to understand why people associate the capital and corporal punishment with a lack of democracy.
It seems to imply that having capital punishment is a mean through which the state controls the people. That is certainly not true. Capital punishment is only used in criminal cases like murder and drug trafficking. Most Singaporeans, like me, are pretty damn happy that it exists and I’m sure that it will continue to exist even if Singapore turns into a true multi-party democracy someday. So, no, it’s not a matter of state vs people.
Watching CNN last night, I noticed that the only person interviewed for this matter was a nutjob from one of the opposition parties in Singapore. He said something along the lines of “The Singapore people are all against the death penalty, it’s just that the media is all state-controlled, so the people don’t realize it.” What a load of bullshit. From that single interview, I can tell why foreigners might think that the Singapore people are all brutally treated by a facist government who dare use such barbaric punishment as hanging…
Liberalism comes with humanism which again comes with lots of human right that preaches no capital punishment and many have come to identify democracy as no capital punishment. Pfft.. America practices the death penalty and they used the electric chair, although not all the states practices it but the suppoed paragon of democracy uses it shows that the death penalty dont equates to barbarism as DarkMirage already said.
And CNN is American Media at its best, and well with America practising some new form of isolationism, it will be soon that everyone in America think Singapore is some kind of a cult country that eats babies.
My opinon is that humanism is just too weak when it is in front of national security and social justice. Though the justice system is supposed to be independent from politics, what if the system is filled with inefficiency, corruption, nepotism, and etc?? Not to mention the existence of multi-party is not sufficient for democracy, a good government is not necesary to be democratic as long as it’s doing the right thing for the majority of its people. Democracy is just one of the means to achieve that.
One who think that “the practice of capital punishment is barbaric” in a particular country is pure ignorant to me if the person does not understand the social structure and the deeper root of culture in that particular country. It is a fact that the definition of “civilization” varies from country to country and the existence of a standard of civilization for the entire world is utopion and will never happen. Capital punishment will serve the purpose of deterrence when the law enforcement is running well enough and the people realize it.
For the uninitiated, the opposition party member that spoke on CNN was charged with slander and corruption. That destroys his credibility some. The fact that one of the senior ruling party members sued him for compensation certainly didn’t add to his objectivity.
Face it: not everyone that goes on CNN is trustworthy. God only knows which nutcase decided to interview THAT nutcase. Take it with a ton of salt, please.
As DM has said, the majority of our citizens are either damn happy or plain apathetic about whatever criminal penalties exist here. Why? Because we are too scared/cowardly/moral/busy/stupid/smart to commit capital crimes, whatever way you put it. I think that applies for every country. Australians, Europeans and Americans may hug trees, but that’s not in the Asian mindset. That’s the way our society functions, and though you may say that we have lower regard for human life, that doesn’t mean all that many people are unhappy about the state of affairs.
The fundamental question is one of law, not human rights or any bullshit oversensitive and overly-free activists are cooking up. That bastard came into our country, and committed a crime that in our penalty for is death. So screw all your opinions on human rights and crap. That’s the law, and it shall be enforced.
My opinion of westerners has dropped again… Japan rocks! XD
Capital punishment is considered by many to be not right, if only because it is forever. Once you kill someone, you can’t take it back, and the problem is (at least in the United States, although I assume it happens everywhere) that innocent people sometimes get conviced of crimes they didn’t do and get executed. Then years later they realize the guy was actually innocent for a number of reasons (botched police investigation, unreliable witnesses that somehow were allowed, racism in the jury, willingness of society to find ANYONE to blame, etc.). The argument goes that even if one innocent person is killed then that’s too many. At least if they were jailed for life, they could still be let out if a mistake were found within their stay in jail.
Then there’s the idea that cetain groups are unfairly targetted for execution. I dont know how it is like in Singapore (if you have a life sentence at all), but in the USA frequently certain groups that commit capital crimes (i.e. rich white people) usually get life sentences while poor black people get executed. Yet again, captial punishment, because it is not absolute (not everyone gets executed, some get leniency of the court to get life in jail) is inherently not fair, and not justice.
Furthermore the criminal justice systems of the free world are based on a few important ideas: Punishment, Deterrance, Retribution, Rehabilitation.
While punishmend and retribution (revenge) are definately exhibited, there is strong evidence (at least in the USA between states with and without captial punishment) that it’s not a very good deterrent at all. People who do things like commit murder usually do it in the heat of a moment and don’t think of the consequences. Finally in terms of rehabilitation, obviously captial punishment doesn’t allow for this. Since justice is based on the fact that criminals can find the error of their ways (or else the idea of parole would not exist) and reform, captial punishment stops this.
So because innocent people may get executed, because certain groups get punished unproportionally because of discrimination, and because it does not really fulfill the goals of the criminal justice system capital punishment is not the best way to deal with things. Or at least that’s our view in Canada.
Yes, those four principles are important, but you forget that they apply only to the convicted, not to the key stakeholder in the matter, the public. Ultimately the law acts in the best interests of the public. It has been made obvious that Nguyen could have caused untold misery, so he was merely unlucky that he tried to run in a country which punishes trafficking with death.
But it wasn’t really bad luck, was it? He knew full well the consequences of his actions; he was caught, therefore he was hanged. He acted with full knowledge of the laws of this country, and they are not unreasonable laws; he can have no plausible defence.
Yes, rehabilitation and retribution are important requirements in a system of justice and punishment, but ultimately the law serves the people of a country, and it serves them best by executing or restraining felons. For four hundred grams of heroin (FOUR HUNDRED GRAMS OF HEROIN!), i think that many many would have suffered. Perhaps some countries have a more relaxed culture on the taking of recreational drugs, but here we think it causes only misery and suffering, not only to the comsumer but all around him.
Justice is for the harmed, not the harmer. That’s our way in Singapore, and I guess our societies are very different then.
And for some clarification, four capital crimes exist: treason, murder, kidnapping and drug trafficking all of which make very big news in Singapore. And this must be emphasised, regardless of either the perpetrator’s or the victim’s social background. Truck driver, businessman, construction worker, CEO, you commit these crimes, you hang. We do give life sentences, but not to murderers, traitors, kidnappers and of course – drug traffickers (FOUR HUNDRED GRAMS OF HEROIN!)
For innocents getting executed, I believe the cases here are very clear-cut. Kidnapping hasn’t happened in a long time. Drug trafficking is simple, carry more than the specified limit and you are guilty. Murder is relatively rare, and the cases that do happen rarely have room for dispute. Treason has never happened. Insanity is not a defence here, only the lack of knowledge that an act is unlawful.
Life here is heavily regulated; we have a patriachial society that doesn’t really like naysayers. But I doubt the public of Singapore will dispute much with this course of action.
If this how Singapore deals with drugs, then so be it. The man knew what the rules were and chose to ignore it. He paid the consequences for his actions. It might seem cruel, but it’s more cruel to give the man a life sentence. Who would want to spend the rest of their life in jail? Citizens would have to pay for him to be in jail. That’s a bit absurd in my opinion.
America does think that Singapore is a cruel country that makes it’s citizens terrified. I learned about the dictatorship in Singapore in school. The paper was called, “No gum-chewing allowed” and it made Singapore seem like a terrible, terrible place to live. It said that citizens were scared to sleep at night and they couldn’t trust anyone. Is that paper true or was it total bulls***?
Maybe all of us “horrible” westerners should keep all of tourist dollars over here in the west, until your ideals become less rigid. You have airport personel running drugs and blaming it on tourists. Your “judges” seem to be more concerned with your international public persona than offering a fair trial to drug offenders, so they have no motivation to admit fault. Why would they if they already have a scapegoat shackled in front of them. It’s easier to kill one innocent person than fix a corrupt system that lines everyone’s pockets. They are the ones who should be executed.
I am keeping my western tourist dollars out of Singapore and instructing every one of my family/friends to to the same.
What an insane society to execute a man for a mere 15 gms of heroin!! (the post above mentioning 400 gms is totally misleading). Has anyone seen anything more insane???
I am curious what kind of BS the Singapore media and government stuffs down the people’s throat to result in such brainwashed posters as above, justifying the state-sponsored murder of innocent men and women.
I call them innocent because they are!! They are just pawns in the big game, in which even the top government official in Singapore are involved.
http://www.singapore-window.org/1020naus.htm
“Singapore’s blood money: Hanging drug couriers but investing with their suppliers ”
If you want to keep your society free of drugs and murder, then educate your children. Don’t blame your failure of parenting on the “drugs”, and for god’s sake do some research on drugs first.
I am NEVER going to set foot in Singapore soil and I am never going to give a single cent of my money to anyone remotely related to Singapore. Clean up your backyard before even thinking of taking my money…. and I urge all sensible, civilized people to do the same. Don’t every fly Singapore airlines and whatever you do, make sure you are not financing this fascist state.
Finally, peace and sympathy to all the families who have lost their beloved ones (sometimes innocent) to this Singapore’s war on drugs.
This is what happens when a wolf leads sheep.
And yes anyone who advocates death penalty for drugs is a moron and a retard.