Marc Alexander: Penalty seen as fitting response

Many opinions have been expressed about the hanging in Singapore of Nguyen Tuong Van. There is a universal view that drug dealing is a vile business, one that takes advantage of, and condemns many to, the antithesis of a life worth living.

There is a view too that the death penalty should never be tolerated. Singapore's death penalty regime has been called barbaric on the grounds that no government should carry out an act that in law is defined as a criminal offence for the individual citizen.

I do not generally support the death penalty but in this case, the arguments miss the point.

Nguyen was caught with 396g of heroin, and pleaded guilty. His reasons for committing the offence are irrelevant even when skewed as a story of misplaced family loyalty. Hollywood scriptwriters will be keen to put the story on the big screen. Unfortunately the only casualty will be the truth.

It is understandable that Australians have been lobbying to reduce the sentence. Had the tactics worked, a selective choice of alternative punishment would have undermined the Singaporean criminal justice system and the principle of one law for all relegated to the dustbin. The effect would be to give foreigners a legal advantage based on the lobbying skills of the country of origin, rather than individual culpability.

Critics have been quick to condemn the lack of public debate about the death penalty in Singapore. Nothing could be further from the truth. The dialogue is muted by tradition but nevertheless ongoing. Subhas Anandan, for example, one of Singapore's top criminal defence lawyers, said the city-state should abandon its use of the mandatory aspect of the death penalty. What Subhas has said - and many Singaporeans are of like mind - is that if Singapore's courts had more discretion, the Melbourne man may have avoided death row. There is also a petition doing the rounds to save the life of other death row inmates.

Since 1991 more than 420 people have been hanged in Singapore, (the majority for drug related offences), and it's a safe bet that anyone contemplating drug trafficking knows the risks of being caught.

Singapore is a sovereign state grappling with the drug problem in a way that makes sense to them. It does not have to make sense to us or conform to any arbitrary standards of human rights our criminal justice system upholds - there is plenty of disagreement about those matters, anyway.

The Singapore Government has consistently maintained that the death penalty is not an issue of human rights. Their perspective has received scant media attention in this country; the debate on the issue has been severely biased and prone to a knee-jerk sentimentalism based on our world view rather than theirs.

The Singaporean justice system does not see the issue in terms of revenge, retribution or even deterrence. There is much research that shows none works, anyway.

The rationale for the death penalty, from the Singapore perspective, is that drug dealing is an act of terrorism indistinguishable from crimes of mass murder. The death penalty therefore is seen as a fitting response for the natural consequences of the distribution of drugs like heroin.

They view all those in the chain of delivery to be blameworthy of mass slaughter just as Tim McVeigh was executed after he brought down a whole building with the appalling loss of life in Oklahoma.

The Singaporean rationale makes sense. Had Nguyen, and others like him, succeeded in bringing the vast quantities of heroin into Australia, how many lives would have been destroyed, families ripped apart, how many deaths? How many habits would have been fed, how much crime ensued as a result, how much profit from misery - going into the pockets of the drug barons?

We can be indignant about the death penalty, we can even feel sorry for the likes of Nguyen who must have rued the day he chose to risk his life for his brother; but before we condemn the Singaporean justice system, we should be mindful of two salient facts.

Whether we care to admit it or not, Singapore has done the dirty work in dispatching another cog in the illicit drug industry and we are the beneficiaries with less heroin on sale.

Furthermore, we have a salutary lesson that those who risk their necks (literally), knowing the laws of Singapore, do so willingly. Their fate is in their hands.

* Marc Alexander is a former Member of Parliament and victims' advocate.