Sec: Singapore to decide on Yong’s clemency appeal

By Andrew Loh | SingaporeScene

President Tony Tan is expected to hand down his decision on the clemency appeal from death row inmate Yong Vui Kong anytime now.

Yong, a Malaysian caught in 2007 for trafficking in 47.27g of heroin into Singapore, submitted his appeal in July this year. Originally scheduled to be hanged in December 2009, Yong's execution has been stayed for almost 2 years now, thanks to the work of his lawyer, M Ravi.

Yong's predicament has attracted international attention and much has been said about his case.
It is now up to the president to decide — or more accurately, the Cabinet to decide. In 2010, the courts in Singapore ruled that the president has no authority to decide on clemency appeals, and that he is obliged to adhere to the Cabinet's decision.

This brings us to the question which some have asked: do members of the Cabinet know who they are sending to the gallows — and are they aware of how many are sent to their deaths each year?

The discomfort I feel is that we have empowered the authorities to execute those as young as 18, including girls. Andrew Loh

If it is the Cabinet which decides on clemency appeals, one would hope that members of the Cabinet would at least be aware of such facts. And accordingly, deliberations on appeals would be scrutinised in detail and the solemn decision taken.

However, even as recently as 2003, doubts have appeared and questions raised about precisely the issue of whether members of the Cabinet are indeed cognisant of certain facts of the number sent to their deaths.

How did former PM get data wrong?
In 2003, then-prime minister Goh Chok Tong, in an interview with the BBC, revealed that the number of people executed that year was "in the region of about 70 to 80". Two days after Goh made that startling disclosure, the government issued a correction and said the number was ten.
It is a mile and more between 10 and 70 to 80.

How did the prime minister, no less, get it wrong so badly? If the Cabinet, of which he headed, deliberates on each clemency appeal, should he not have had a better idea of how many executions were carried out each year? Clemency appeals are, by law, automatic in death penalty cases. This means the Cabinet, and Goh, would know how many times a case passes through their desk for consideration for pardon.

70 to 80 cases in a year would mean between 5.8 to 6.7 clemency appeals per month would have to be considered by each member of the Cabinet.

So, the question remains to this day: are clemency appeals indeed deliberated on and considered by the Cabinet? If so, how did the then prime minister get the numbers wrong?
One may say that this was a long time ago, in 2003. But the point is this: if we are to send inmates, which include girls as young as 18 and boys like Yong who was 19 when he was arrested, to the death chamber we must be absolutely sure that our leaders responsible for taking these lives take their responsibilities seriously.

Is every one of our present Cabinet ministers aware of the provisions in the various laws and statutes which empower them and the courts to send someone to death? Is each minister aware of the presumption provisions in the Misuse of Drugs Act, for example? I am not so sure they are.
But my objection to the death penalty is the mandatory part of it, at least for now. I do hope for the total abolition of the death penalty in time to come. But for now, I am more disturbed by the mandatory requirement of the death sentence for particular crimes.

No restitution for the innocent
The discomfort I feel is that we have empowered the authorities to execute those as young as 18, including girls. I find it unconscionable that teenagers, which those 18-year olds are, can be and have been hanged in the name of punishment and deterrence which, for the most part, has not been proved beyond doubt.

I am not advocating that the hanging age be raised. I am, however, saying that we need to relook the mandatory requirements of certain laws. And this is not just because of the age issue but also that making death mandatory — where the judges have no choice but to send someone to death if he or she is found guilty of the relevant crime committed — means there is no possibility of restitution if one was hanged and found innocent later.

The recent case of Ismil Kadar comes to mind. He escaped mandatory death, after having spent six years in jail and on death row, only because of the persistence of his legal aid lawyer.
How many more Ismil Kadars languish in our jails presently?

Or Zai Kuning, who also was sentenced to mandatory death for murder only to be found not guilty later — by the sheer coincidence and luck in another inmate boasting about how he had committed the murder instead and how the police had "got the wrong man in jail".

It was the late Mr JB Jeyaretnam who then informed the authorities which then proceeded to investigate the matter. Eventually, Zai Kuning was exonerated of the crime and released.
Those who support the death penalty and the mandatory death penalty need to seriously consider these examples of those innocent ones who were tried in court, sentenced to death, denied clemency appeals and scheduled to be hanged — and saved only by pure luck or through the dogged persistence of the rare few lawyers in Singapore who would dedicate years to such cases.

Opportunity to break from past
President Tony Tan, or more accurately, the Cabinet, has a golden opportunity now to stay Yong's execution under a moratorium and to relook the legal provisions and practices for mandatory death sentences, and indeed reconsider the application of the death penalty itself.

With a reconstituted Cabinet, the current prime minister has a clean slate to break away from the folly of the past. To miss this opportunity would be to continue to bury his head in the sand and hope to see no evil and hear no evil, as it were.

Singapore needs desperately indeed to bring itself in line with international consensus, which is towards the abolition of the death penalty, and the scrapping of the mandatory death penalty.
The mandatory one, especially, has no place in a society which professes itself to be first world.
Not when it continues to kill, in cold blood, teenagers.

And not when its former prime minister brushes off, rather callously, inquiries about the number of executions carried out by his government — as Goh did in 2003.

"I have got more important issues to worry about," he said.