For more in-depth critiques of the death penalty in Singapore, Kirsten Han has written extensively on the subject (and you can pay her for her efforts.) Here is a compilation of some good Twitter accounts to follow for more discourse surrounding inequality in Singapore. Teo You Yenn’s This is What Inequality Looks Like is an excellent resource.
To whom it may concern,
I hope you are well. I’m writing to you as a member of your GRC who has an issue they would like raised in Parliament, specifically with regards to Singapore’s stance on the death penalty.
I’m sure the government took notice of the recent public outrage regarding Syed Suhail’s hanging, and the subsequent public relief when he was granted a stay of execution following the uproar. The media cycle has since moved on, but that doesn’t change the fact that currently, Singapore has the highest execution rate in the world relative to its population. We are killing people in cold, administrative blood, and for absolutely no reason.
Singapore has previously cited “deterrence” as the explanation for the death penalty remaining — but if this is the case, why are state-sanctioned executions not publicised? It is a mystery who is being killed, and for what. Kirsten Han has pointed out that the numbers (and only numbers) appear in a tiny corner of an annual report — and who is reading these? Who exactly do we deter by killing people quietly, out of the public eye?
What we do accomplish through the death penalty is intense trauma to those related to the accused. They are innocent, and yet the legal system drags them through the heart-wrenching process of watching their loved ones being sentenced to death, and then forcing them through the traumatic waiting game while the state coolly decides when their family member should be killed.
The drug problem in Singapore is not even slightly abetted by the existence of the death penalty. You keep catching drug mules (many of them victims of the problem themselves!) and killing them, while those at the top of the drug world continue to find new pawns and continue their business as per normal.
The “drug problem” is also socially manufactured — the reason why people on the upper echelons of society, people like you and your family, feel that only “bad” people succumb to drug habits, is because you exist in a different version of Singapore than many of your citizens do. You can afford “healthy” recreation — not just financially, but in the currency of time too. You’re not working multiple jobs to make ends meet, not constantly under the stress of outstanding debt, not exposed to the same realities that the working class is.
When you brag about the death penalty as a cure to the “drug problem”, what you are really saying is that the answer to class inequality is death. That the cure to barely-liveable circumstances is a simple series of executions.
These are your people you are killing in cold blood. These are the people you were sworn into office to protect. The government fails its people when communities seek support from it and are instead slapped with a death sentence for behaviours that are direct consequences of its neglect. You may not think our government is a failure, but to so many who depend on you, it is. You are.
Singapore is the only so-called “first world” nation still upholding the draconian death penalty, despite resounding cries across the globe for it to be scrapped. We’re a global embarrassment. And we hold on to this practice despite the countless cases which arise and prove that the people we have executed are, in hindsight, not guilty.
I leave you with this quote from Amnesty International: “The death penalty legitimises an irreversible act of violence by the state and will inevitably claim innocent victims. As long as human justice remains fallible, the risk of executing the innocent can never be eliminated.”
Please do the right thing and call for the abolition of the death penalty in Parliament.
Love & soap,
worms
This letter was originally written as an e-mail to the ministers in my GRC, but I’ve decided to post it publicly with some edits in case they do not see it there. I pledge to keep writing to them, consistently and insistently, and I hope you will do the same.
