Te Radar: Political correctness and the traditional art of execution

For the last few years, whenever I flew alone, I have done so dressed as a small boy. That way I am invariably offered the chance to meet women flying unaccompanied.

I am sure drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van would not have minded being moved to sit anywhere on a plane, so long as the aircraft was leaving Singapore, where this morning he will be exterminated. By who is at this stage unclear.

The former executioner, 73-year-old Darshin Singh, claims to have been sacked, and that he is the only one capable of performing the execution without having the condemned end up "struggling like chickens, [or] like fish out of water". He has a point. Hanging someone is an art. That was proved here on 5 October 1866.

On that day in Nelson, three men were executed for the so-called Maungatapu murders. Of the three, Thomas Kelly was the most unfortunate.

He and his two conspirators had spent a few weeks listening to the construction of the gallows outside their cells, and on the scheduled morning were walked the short distance to the scaffold.

Kelly was asked the obligatory "any last words" question, whereupon he proceeded to deliver what may be this country's longest "any last words" speech, halted only when the crowd realised he was drunk and intent on proclaiming his innocence.

On the scaffold, as the noose was drawn tight around his neck, Kelly was reported to have exclaimed, "Don't choke me!"

Then the fearful Kelly somehow managed to bounce himself off the drop-board, and had to be bounced back on again.

Finally, the lever was pulled, and his two accomplices plummeted to their immediate deaths.

Kelly, however, hung wriggling for quite some time.

After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, broken only by his muffled grunting, the executioner was required to leap up on to Kelly's body and swing off him three times before Kelly was finally still, and justice was seen to be done.

Some say executions function as a deterrent. Sadly, in this instance, this was not really the case. The executioner, a prisoner from Wellington - granted freedom, paid a small amount and allowed all of the clothes of the condemned men for his efforts - was later hanged in Hobart.

It is a shame Nguyen wasn't imprisoned here. Not only would his life have been rightly spared, he may not have even been incarcerated for too long, given the apparent ease with which inmates escape.

Prisoners in Wellington recently escaped by breaking through a cell wall made from chipboard, which came as a great surprise to me, for I had no idea that chipboard was even on the list of recommended materials to construct cells from.