Once a Jolly Hangman (3 page)

This is the kind of powerful imagery that feeds into the abolitionist campaign. But Singapore's authorities don't want this kind of thing becoming current knowledge. Au continues:

All governments dislike dissent and they will do anything to stop it taking on a life of its own. When the police were sent to disrupt the forum it was entirely typical, part of the whole pattern of this government in trying to put a lid on arguments that they find inconvenient. This tendency to act pre-emptively to smother dissent is given freer reign simply because the press is muzzled and civil society so quiescent and emasculated. No one questions this kind of repression. Everyone goes along with it and the government's campaign to squash dissent becomes even more effective. They are then emboldened to get even tougher - so much so that they sometimes act unlawfully themselves. But
nobody stands up and challenges these attempts to crush freedom of thought and register dissent. The disruption of forum is entirely characteristic. To voice an opinion that the government finds inconvenient or worse in terms of the governments perspective to try to propagate that opinion. They intimidate everyone. That's how they've always been.

The authorities in Singapore have been criticised by both the United Nations and the European Union who expressed particular concerns about Singapore's use of the mandatory death penalty and high executions rate. However, the government has consistently argued that the use of the death penalty is not a question of human rights. It has vigorously defended its stance that executions have been effective in deterring crime, particularly drug trafficking. This flies in the face of evidence that drug use has increased in recent years and that trafficking goes on despite the dire consequences. In a letter addressed to the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and circulated in 2001 at the 57th session of the Commission on Human Rights, the Permanent Representative of Singapore to the UN stated:

The death penalty is primarily a criminal justice issue, and therefore is a question for the sovereign jurisdiction of each country. The right to life is not the only right, and it is the duty of societies and governments to decide how to balance competing rights against each other.

In 2002 the Permanent Representaive bitterly attacked the then Special Rapporteur, claiming she had 'repeatedly exceeded her mandate and degraded the credibility of her office' after she expressed concern about the case of two men facing execution for drug trafficking. Singapore signed a statement disassociating itself from a UN resolution adopted in April 2003 calling for the establishment of moratoria on executions pending complete abolition and stating that the abolition of the death penalty contributes to the progressive development of human rights. Claiming that the death penalty has been effective in controlling the trade in illicit drugs, the Singapore authorities reported an overall decline in the number of drug users arrested between 1994 and 2001. However, drug addiction has since continued to be a problem - particularly among the poorly educated, impoverished, unemployed and young people from broken homes.

During the months leading up to the execution of convicted the Australian drug trafficker, Nguyen Van Tuong, in December 2005 arguments for and against the death penalty raged across Australia and around the world. Singapore seemed determined not to give in to international pressure and to hang this young man come what may. And it pulled out all the stops to make sure its defensive
publicity campaign got its opinion across - even to the point, it was suggested, that its operatives sent a letter published in The Straits Times purportedly written by an Australian citizen in support of hanging Nguyen and hailed as typical of the public sentiment down under! This particular execution came at an awkward time for the city state when, around the same time a German citizen, Julia Suzanne Bohl, who had been under surveillance for months by narcotics police as a high profile drug trafficker in Singapore, managed to escape the death penalty through political and diplomatic pressure from Germany. The charges against her were suddenly - and 'miraculously' - modified. The charges were reduced to
a non-mandatory death penalty level and she was given five years of which she served only three.

Two days before Nguyen was hanged on 2 December 2005, Joseph K.H. Koh, the Singapore High Commissioner in Australia, wrote an article in support of the execution of the young Australian citizen which was published in various Australian newspapers and the internet. Capital punishment, he claimed, remains part of the criminal justice systems of 76 countries, including in the United States, where it is practised in 38 states. 'We respect Australia's sovereign choice not to have capital punishment. We hope Australia will likewise respect Singapore's sovereign choice to impose the death penalty for the most serious crimes, including drug trafficking. The overwhelming majority of Singaporeans support this'. The claim by abolitionists that the death penalty has not deterred drug trafficking is incorrect, he added. "This logic is flawed. The death penalty has not completely eliminated drug trafficking, but it has certainly deterred drug trafficking. Since the introduction of tough anti-drug laws in the mid-1970s, drug trafficking and drug abuse in Singapore have come down significantly. Potential traffickers know that, once arrested, they face the full weight of the law'.

As Singapore propaganda machine went into higher gear, Asad Latif, a former senior reporter with The Straits Times, and a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, wrote:

It is unfortunate Nguyen has to die, but the law against drug trafficking must be implemented uniformly. What is surprising, though, is how those aspects appear to have been subsumed by condemnations of an upstart city-state for having dared to condemn to death a citizen
of an island-continent. They have the right, if they so wish, to argue that their laws are better than those of Singapore. But - and this is the critical caveat - no one has the right to expect, let alone demand, that Singapore bend its laws to suit the laws of another country. Incidentally, expecting special treatment for foreign criminals reveals a sense that their lives are more precious than those of Singaporean criminals. Where is the justice in that view? But we also understood that a country whose sovereign right of action is held hostage by external forces will soon have little to protect. Sovereignty, then, is the key issue.

2

A Tale of Two Hangmen

For fifty years Darshan Singh was called upon by Singapore city state to kill people its justice system considered unfit to live or deserved to die. Since 1959, as chief executioner, Singh estimates that he has executed around 1,000 men and women until he finally retired at the age of 75 in 2006. He was nothing like I imagined an executioner when I first met him on the doorstep of his flat in a working class suburb wearing only a pair of baggy shorts and sandals. He seemed more like a kindly, if dishevelled, grandfather as he stood looking at me through the iron bars of the security gate, with a quizzical expression on his weathered face. Before he appeared I was not expecting someone with such a record of killing so many of his fellow human beings to look so ordinary, a person who would not necessarily stand out in a crowd, or someone you might see sitting quietly at a bar drinking a glass of beer. I introduced myself as a freelance journalist and explained why I had come to see him. He smiled, unlocked the barred iron gate separating us and invited me in to talk about his career and the execution of the Australian drug trafficker, Nguyen Van Tuong, then on death row in Changi Prison. Sitting comfortably in armchairs opposite each other and sipping drinks in his living room, Darshan Singh began reminiscing about his grim calling. It all began, purely by chance, when he was in his mid-twenties. He then talked enthusiastically about his strong belief that the role he played as master of the gallows for nearly half a century was key to why Singapore had become one of the safest nations on earth to live in. And he emphasised that he had no regrets or conscience at having killed so many men and women in a career few
would even dream of following. 'I was just doing my job, lah', he said many times. 'It was an important job'.

Another executioner whose methods on the gallows Darshan Singh assiduously followed was Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's most prolific hangman. Until he retired, he too was proud of what he had done on behalf of the state while carefully keeping detailed records of those he killed. When he retired Pierrepoint's 'kills' totalled 435 carried out in prisons all over Britain and occupied Germany from 1931 to 1956. Some of those he hanged were Second World War Nazi criminals and spies and their executions were mostly carried out in the British- occupied zone of Germany after the Third Reich collapsed. Pierrepoint, too, was proud to have served his country in such a distasteful way.

Accepting his approximate one thousand executions as accurate, Darshan Singh, an Indian Sikh and Muslim convert who grew up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is arguably the world's most prolific official hangman of all time or since records were kept. He was born in 1933. For his part, Pierrepoint began his career just two years later, following in the footsteps his uncle, Thomas Pierrepoint, and his father, Henry Pierrepoint. For more than half a century the Pierrepoint dynasty dominated the list of all official executioners in Britain. But the total number of convicts they hanged comes nowhere near Darshan
Singh's astonishing record taking into account the difference in the populations of both countries.

Darshan Singh was appointed Singapore's chief executioner when he was 27. Those he hanged were convicted of a variety of crimes from murder to drug trafficking. When I asked him exactly how many he had executed, he thought for a moment. 'Not really sure, lah', he said. 'Can be over 1,000 can be under'. When I contacted the Ministry for Home Affairs they could not verify that figure. To the government, anything to do with the death penalty must always be shrouded in mystery. No official statistics have ever been made available. Perhaps this may be because, having the highest per capita execution rate in the world, Singapore does not wish to be challenged by the fact - as has been shown in every country that has abolished the death penalty - that fear of the gallows does not deter capital crimes anywhere. If Darshan Singh's figure is accurate, the statistics are stunning and challenge belief. Singapore's population was a mere two million in 1959
when Darshan Singh took on the job. It's now nudging five million. The UK population was around 48 million in the 1930s. It is now more than 60 million. Capital punishment was abolished there in 1965. According to Amnesty International Singapore has long had the highest per capita execution rate in the world.

As dedicated executioners, both Darshan Singh and Pierrepoint appear to have had many things in common with similar personalities. Pierrepoint, long dead, believed he was put on earth especially to do what he did and was 'protected by a higher power' throughout his long career. 'It is no source of pride, it is simply history, that I have carried out the execution of more judicial sentences of death than any executioner in any British record or archive'. But then he added: 'That fact is the measure of my experience. The fruit of my experience has this bitter after-taste: that I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge'.

Darshan Singh talked to me in similar if less grandiose terms. But far from considering what he did was a waste of time he sincerely believes he has helped make Singapore an ideal place for all its citizens to live in peace and harmony and the economic success that it is today. Whether or not he will one day come to the same conclusion as Pierrepoint and condemn his life of killing is something only he can decide. Looking at those smiling, shiny dark eyes as we talked it was impossible to detect what he was really thinking. But I sometimes suspect that he had his own demons to deal with in the middle of the night, perhaps, with hundreds of other eyes staring back at him - the terrified eyes of those he last saw a split second before he sent them plunging to their doom and uttered those chilling, unforgettable words, 'I am sending you to a better place than this'.

In 1948, one of Britain's most ardent and vociferous anti-death penalty campaigners, the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, said this in the House of Commons:

It is not only the melodrama and sensationalism with which these proceedings are surrounded, it is not only the sordid squalor, every detail of which spreads into newspapers in every one of these crimes, it is not only the relentless finality of this penalty. No one who knows the
records can doubt that there have been cases of error,
that there have been miscarriages of justice, and that innocent men have in fact been executed. Until human judgment is infallible, we have no right to inflict irrevocable doom. Above all these things, there is the sense which we all have that this penalty, of itself, denies the very principle on which we claim the right to inflict it - namely, the sanctity of human life. The sole justification, if there be one, for the retention of this penalty is that is it necessary to protect society. No one can prove that this is true, no one can prove that it is untrue, but we may compare it and draw inferences from the comparison with the state of affairs in other countries in which this penalty has been abolished.

The possible travesties of justice Silverman said could not be countenanced in a society such as Britain were later to become a reality. There were proven tragedies. We will never know how many others have been killed by the state on the basis of flawed evidence? Silverman's impassioned speech when he introduced his bill to abolish the death penalty eventually had its desired effect. But not before the Conservative MP, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe KC, who became Home Secretary in 1951, would accept the idea of judicial error. 'Of course, a jury might go wrong, the Court of Appeal might go wrong, as might the House of Lord and the Home Secretary. They might all be stricken mad and go wrong. But that is not a possibility that anyone can consider likely. The honourable and learned Member is moving in a realm of fantasy when he makes that suggestion'. Nevertheless Silverman got his way by a large majority and the bill passed on to the House of Lords where it was rejected, as expected, by a majority of 153. No executions were carried out while abolition was on the parliamentary agenda, and they were not resumed until November 1948, after a gap of nine months. The abolitionist movement grew stronger and resulted in a Royal Commission to examine capital punishment in all its ugly detail. In 1956 the death penalty was finally abolished in Britain for all time. Much of this historic event can be attributed to Albert Pierrepoint's boldness when he and some British newspapers first broke the Official Secrets Act. Fortunately for the establishment he was not prosecuted no doubt wisely deciding that much worse would inevitably have come out at his trial. His daring - albeit for money and publicity to boost the takings at his pub - had a huge effect on the public conscience and the eventual decision to do away with the gallows forever.