“There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve HANGING ten times in his life.” – Michel Eyquem De Montaigne (1533-1592)
“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon HUMANITY. Man is now only more active, not more happy nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.” – Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1845)
As of 6am MYT (9am AEDT), Nguyen Tuong Van is here no more. The 25 year old Vietnamese-Australian was sentenced to death after he was found guilty by Singaporean courts of the act of trafficking 400gms of heroin while in transit from Cambodia to Melbourne.
While some continue to rake their heads as to the reasons WHY and others continue to explain the rationality behind the Singapore government’s refusal to grant the ‘boy’ clemency, let us spare a moment of silence in our busy lives to ask this:
Can the death penalty be a true representation of how far we have come in terms of being human? Or are we beginning to distant ourselves from what makes us truly what we are – fallible?
Time and again I get reminded of why emotional arguments have no place in jurisprudence.
To the average person, the question of whether or not the death penalty has a place in civilisation, is effectively one of how much the debate of the moment affects you emotionally.
I doubt the outpouring of sympathy and compassion for Van would be quite as overwhelming if the campaign to free him hadn’t humanised him. The key to the campaign’s birth was the fact that Van was the brother with the squeaky clean record.
Public emotions would have gone quite differently if it had been his bad apple twin brother facing the gallows.
That’s my problem with having lay arguments cloud the debate. The fallibility of humanity is in its heartstrings. Pull the right ones and defence lawyers reward themselves wuth a jury nullification.
From the comments here and in your other post on this issue, clearly, everyone has their own thresholds for who deserves the death penalty.
With much respect to Najah, whilst I appreciate the logic, the fact is that the legal system will never be perfect, no matter which jurisdiction, simply because its players – judge, jury, lawyers, legislators -are human, with different standards of compassion, different morality thresholds.
Not many are going to hold yellow flowers for Sadam Hussein should he be convicted and given a death sentence. There is likely to be no groundswelling of campaigns for clemency where the prisoner is a callous drug dealer responsible for peddling drugs to children, serial rapists, sociopaths, etc.
As long as one and one’s own are untouched on a intimate, PERSONAL, level, one always has the capacity to be civilised. Rare are those whose rationality and humanity don’t succumb in facing the fires of personal vengeance.
It’s a tough call. And people these days don’t have the attention spans to consider the many levels for meaningful discourse.
See how long this comment already is?