Nike X E18 : Divide And Conquer

On New Year's day Sunday, the Sunday Times (the pro-government mouthpiece Straits Times' Sunday edition) published a piece by one of it's journalist, K.C Vijayan. Titled "Should Singapore consider execution by lethal injection?". What a way to start the New Year by talking about how to kill effectively & efficiently!!
Anyway, I strongly recommend everybody, especially Singaporeans, to read this new book called Hung At Dawn by M Ravi. It is available at most bookshops here. After my post, you will find the full synopsis of the book from it's back cover.It is a very revealing book about Singapore's legal system especially pertaining to the death penalty. And of course, the human drama. All written in an easy to read and understandable format for the man/woman in the streets.I just want to mention two incidents involving the Chief Justice of Singapore. These incidents are recounted in detail in Hung At Dawn. Both relate to the Vignes Mourthi case in 2003 which you can also read in full in the book.Firstly, Mourthi's lawyer M Ravi, in a final appeal in the Court of Appeal, asked whether ".....the Deputy Public Prosecutor is still maintaining that an innocent man can be hanged due to procedural matters." The Chief Justice replied "Yes; the answer is yes."Secondly, when the condemned man requested the reasons for his execution, the Chief Justice replied "the decision would be published in due course and everyone could find the reason there". Thing is, Mourthi was to be executed the next morning!!!These were extremely pathetic and callous replies from someone who happens to be the Chief Justice of Singapore!!! For now, I can only shake my head in disgust and anger at such an attitude.Anyway, please get the book and read it 'cos all you're going to get from the pro-government media is one side of the picture.Related: Book Review of Hung At Dawn by Charles Tan
Synopsis of Hung At Dawn on what first seemed like just another day, a young Malaysian commuter-worker was arrested in Singapore in September 2001, a nation which has the highest per capita execution in the world (according to 2004 report by Amnesty International). The charge: drug-dealing. He had just handed an undercover narcotics agent a small bag packed with 27.65g of heroin and received $8,000 in return. But was he really a drug-dealer? The young man swore his innocence, insisting that he was only doing a favor for an old family friend, who had asked him to pass along some religious incense to an associate and collect some money from him.
From there, the young man went on a rapid plunge downward through the dark hole of a system he had little understanding of. He found himself facing a mandatory death penalty for dealing drugs and was dragged quickly through the few stages the Singapore justice system allows between arrest and execution: trial, the single appeal, and the clemency plea to the president – all to no avail.The story might have ended right there for this young man, as it has for so many others found guilty of capital crimes in Singapore. It would have if not for a veteran human rights activist and a young lawyer who took up the cause and brought the young Malaysian's fight into legal areas never before dared in this tightly regulated city-state.Hung At Dawn is the true story of the desperate fight to save this young man from a possible miscarriage of justice, veering around and leaping over all the roadblocks the legal system here sets up. It also tells the story of a second, even more well-known case the young lawyer fought in defence of a convicted drug-dealer two years later. This tale, also true in every detail, involves a charismatic figure who had risen from grinding poverty to become a kind of national hero in Singapore (having won a medal in the Jet-Ski World Championship), only to fall when personal problems led him to start using and dealing in soft drugs. Caught at a border crossing, this former hero was sentenced to die for possession of just over 1 kilo of cannabis!The latter part of Hung At Dawn looks at the unprecedented campaign which Guardian described as a “high profile campaign” in their report entitled “Singapore finally finds a voice in death row protest”. To save this man's life, a campaign that stretched beyond the courts into the streets to engage the general Singapore public and brought together a wide coalition of people galvanized by this particular case and the wider struggle to bring Singapore's drug laws more into line with international humane standards.
Sunday,21st May,2006

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