[Obit] "I paid my fare like everybody else."

[khaosworks]

"All I was doing was trying to get home from work."

Comments

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

The Reuters story is pretty good, though they ignore some important players in Montgomery and still play up the "Rosa Parks started it all" story line. She was an incredibly brave woman, but I much prefer the NPR story on Morning Edition today (should be available online in a few hours), which mentions the women's political caucus in Montgomery and Parks' prior involvement in civil rights. The only key player NPR forgot to mention was E.D. Nixon.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Any thoughts on this case? (I'll understand if you prefer to withold comment.)

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Mmm, not much to say really. Amnesty International seems to be harping on the fact that the mandatory death penalty is cruel and unusual and a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That's as may be, but that's no basis for challenging the legality of Van's conviction, or his sentence. If anything, it shows up the UDHR as the paper tiger it is, and the UN as being pretty much reduced to weakly protesting when it comes to international affairs. No wonder the neocons are unimpressed with it.

The simple reality of the matter is, drug trafficking in more than 15 grams of heroin attracts the death penalty. That's the law in Singapore, and it's not as if people like Van aren't aware of it. Now, 15 g may not seem like much, nor does the 396.2 g that Van was carrying, but consider the fact that that weight is pure diamorphine, distilled from the cut heroin he was carrying.

The street purity of heroin in South-East Asia is about 3%-5%, so at a rough guess, assuming what he was carrying was for distribution here, it would have been nearly 8 kilos of heroin. A single dose is maybe about 3 g, so that's about 2,600 doses. There's not much of a margin for error here. He admits he was carrying the drugs; it may have been to pay off debts for his father, but there's the wider issue of spreading drug addiction to consider here.

It comes down to whether you (a) believe that drug addiction is a serious problem with deadly consequences (which the government does) and (b) the death penalty is fundamentally right (which the government does). If either does not appeal to you, then of course you'd oppose Van's conviction and sentence on philosophical grounds.

It's not an easy issue to tackle. There's a whole lot of things to consider: the problem of drug addiction, whether drugs should be criminalised at all, what precisely is the death penalty supposed to be: a deterrent or an expression of societal outrage, and so on. I won't go into my views on those because it'd take too long.

But to simplify it grossly, my position on the death penalty is the same as that of Thomas Jefferson. To paraphrase, he said that he would continue to object to the death penalty until the infallibility of man was demonstrated to him. In esssence, I have no problem with capital punishment per se; I merely assert that it should not be implemented where there is the possibility of doubt as to the guilt of the perpertrator. In Van's case, there is no doubt in my mind. He played the odds, he knew the penalties, and he's going to pay the price. Like I said, it's not as if he didn't know.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Do you think AI's appeal has any chance of succeeding? (I'm guessing "no".) And either way, what would be the likely impact (if any) of this appeal on future cases?

It seems to me what they may be able (or at least are trying) to do is establish a precedent for leniency in cases where the convict has made some restitution by helping solve the bigger problem of the trafficking organisation that recruited him.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

No, and not much. AI hasn't had made a very good impression on the government over the years, what with their loud lobbying and accusations of barbarism. Ultimately, the President and the Cabinet won't bow to them because Van's case really isn't all that extraordinary.

Precedent doesn't meant a lot here, because it's not legally binding on any future decisions the President or Cabinet might make, since the appeal to clemency is a political one, ultimately, and everything can be justified on a case-by-case basis, or a cynical and fatuous "that was then, this is now" statement.

The real decision was made when the Attorney-General decided to charge Van for trafficking rather than reduce it to a lesser offence. Any plea bargaining should have been made then, and if it was, it obviously wasn't accepted. Amnesty is pissing into the wind, here, really, because it has absolutely no standing to argue on Van's behalf.

(You may be able to tell that I'm not too impressed with AI either - they may have noble motives, but all too often they're willing to distort facts to fit their advocacy. Given that I was once an advocate myself that may be hypocritical, but I've grown less tolerant of truth-twisting since I went to the bench, and that was reinforced when I became an academic.)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

OK, thanks.

Any objections if I point other enquirers to this discussion?

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Not at all. No guarantees I'll respond, but hey... :)

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I oppose capital punishment on policy grounds, not merely because I believe the system is not infallible but also because the deterrent effect is questionable. We are going to have cases from time to time such as Westley Alan Dodd, who effectively used the judicial system in Washington to commit suicide.

And while Van's case may not be one in which the guilt of the defendant is in doubt, what about Flor Cantinflas? That's the case that, in my opinion, really calls into question the need for a mandatory death sentence in Singapore for any offense.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Flor Contemplacion.

And my comments are my personal view about capital punishment, not judicial policy, so that's really neither here nor there. That's a philosophical argument in the end, not a legal one.