Shanmugam's misleading defense of the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 5:11PM Law Minister K Shanmugam defended the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking by appealing to irrational fears and a disingenuous argument.
People assume you can have this safety and security without this framework of the law; that you can change it, and yet your safety and security will not be affected. But there are always trade-offs. The difficulty the Government has sometimes in explaining this is that the trade-offs are not apparent. The damage to a large number of others is not obvious. You save one life here, but 10 other lives will be gone. What will your choice be?
We are sending a signal to all the drug barons out there, just make sure you choose a victim who’s young, or who’s preferably a mother of a young child and use them as the people to carry the drugs into Singapore. And then there can be a lot of sympathy generated if they do get caught.
I would like the minister to explain, logically, how removing the mandatory death penalty will suddenly result in a deluge of easily available drugs that will harm thousands of people. It's not that the death penalty will be removed (though I would like it to be), but handing discretionary sentencing to the judges to determine the punishment, rather than a simple guilty/not-guilty dichotomy, is not a major change in the legal framework tantamount to announcing our "going soft on drug trafficking". Why would the judges not hand down the death penalty if they deem capital punishment to be appropriate?
His second argument is even worse: it is an admission that we only hang the mules who are unfortunate enough to be caught with the drugs, and not the "drug barons" who should be responsible. And does anyone actually believe that these drug barons care who they send to their potential deaths?
They definitely do not. And by not caring about substance of pursuing these drug barons and instead choosing to assert the superficiality of sending drug mules to the gallows to attain a facade of being tough on drugs, our government shows as much concern to these mules as the drug barons that they claim to attack.
K Shanmugam, drug court, mandatory death penalty in Law, Singapore
Reader Comments (3)
'We are sending a signal to all the drug barons out there, just make sure you choose a victim who’s young, or who’s preferably a mother of a young child and use them as the people to carry the drugs into Singapore. And then there can be a lot of sympathy generated if they do get caught.'
Hmm. Did Mr Shanmugam say that?
That's his justification for keeping the mandatory death penalty.
I see..