Up in Arms Down Under ... Again

(First published in Bali Advertiser, December 7, 2005)

And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. – Deuteronomy 19:21

Unless the Singapore government wavers – and it hardly ever does -- by the time this is in print, Australian Nguyen Tuong Van will have been dead five days, hanged for trying to smuggle heroin through Changi Airport on his way to Australia from Cambodia in 2002.

Australia, of course, has had the plight of drug-running or drug-using citizens highlighted in Indonesia this year by Michelle Leslie, Schapelle Corby, and the Bali Nine. Leslie was released in November after serving three months, escaping a potentially much longer sentence; Corby is serving 15 years in a Bali prison and is appealing her case to the highest Indonesian court; and the ‘Nine’ are on trial for heroin smuggling charges carrying the death penalty. Two other Australians have been sentenced to die for running drugs in Vietnam.

Nguyen, the young man Singapore will hang Dec. 2, would seem to have the biggest claim on any sympathy. He’s the “selfless drug mule”, who agreed to carry 400 grams of heroin from Cambodia to Australia in order to pay off his twin brother’s A$30,000 in drug-related legal fees. “He … is described by those who know him as a decent, cheerful and dutiful young man,” Richard Lloyd Parry wrote in a Nov. 25 article for The Times.

And Singapore really is doing an injustice if Nguyen is as artless a criminal as most articles paint him to be. But why did it take Australians so long to note his arrest, trial, and sentence? The hubbub now is “like visiting a dead person in hospital,” said Subhas Anandan, a prominent Singapore defense attorney, in a Nov. 25 article in The Australian. Singapore has a mandatory death penalty for anyone convicted of carrying more than 15 grams of heroin and has never granted clemency to anyone after all appeals have been exhausted.

While Australian Prime Minister John Howard has been restrained in his diplomacy for Nguyen’s life, the public and press have been calling for boycotts and sanctions. “The death penalty is abhorrent, it is repulsive,” writes Barbara Curzon-Siggers, in a weepy-eyed piece Nov. 30 in The Age. She suggests in her article that Singapore is violating an international consensus that the death sentence is immoral, or perhaps “barbaric,” as an earlier Australian PM called the execution of two drug smugglers in Malaysia 20 years ago.

But there is no such consensus, not in Asia, where the death penalty is on the books of most countries, and not in the United States, where 64 percent of the population supports capital punishment, according to an October Gallup poll. Indeed, Dec. 2, North Carolina is likely to hold the 1,000th execution since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

The possible execution of Stanley Tookie Williams Dec. 13 in California also has capital punishment back as a top US news topic. Williams is co-founder of the California-based Crips gang and was convicted of murdering four people in 1979. Since then, anti-gang work has earned him five nominations for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he’s written nine children’s books. He already had many Hollywood heavyweights advocating for him before the 2004 movie, “Redemption.” Now he is a full-blown celebrity cause, with Jesse Jackson, Bianca Jagger, and Snoop Dogg, among others, petitioning Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to commute his sentence to life.

Capital punishment is seldom debated without the hysteria surrounding cases like Williams’s and Nguyen’s. Clearer minds need to look at the question: Do governments have the right to execute lawbreakers? Both Singapore and the US say they do, and Singapore takes to heart the injunction “thine eye shall not pity.” Last-minute, weak-knee editorials aren’t an effective counter.

Yes, ideally, societies would do without capital punishment. Realistically, some people are “bad machines,” and governments and laws can be flawed. Either way, people are going to be killed. And no matter the thinking of the “right-minded,” nations such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the US have the sovereign right to their own judicial structures. Raising a fuss only when one of your own gets into trouble or only when the cause is glamorous isn’t going to change anything -- not when a month later, attention will have passed to the next arm-raising exercise.

Sadly, Nguyen will be old news by late December. Rather than indulging in periodic attacks of indignation, Australians would do better to make sure their traveling young men and women know and respect the laws of countries on an itinerary … or keep them at home. It would save more lives than boycott threats and arguments that “everyone knows the death penalty is wrong.”

They don’t.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi