Advertisement

COMMENT: How do we justify the death sentence without unanimous judgments?

COMMENT: How do we justify the death sentence without unanimous judgments?

Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own.

Some Friday mornings an inmate is awakened before dawn and taken to a chamber in a maximum security section of Changi Prison. A noose is slipped over his or her head, the knot positioned under a ear to make sure the spinal cord is broken upon impact, to ensure instant death. A doctor certifies the inmate dead and the body is taken away for the family to claim later.

Once this is done, there is no going back.

There is no punishment more final than that of the death penalty. Its irreversibility means that when we send someone to the gallows, we must be sure. Beyond sure. There can be no questions, no loose ends, no doubt whatsoever.

Yet in Singapore people can be sentenced to death even when there is disagreement among judges ruling on the case. Take Kho Jabing, the 31-year-old Sarawakian convicted of murder after a robbery ended up with one man dead. Following the changes to the mandatory death penalty in 2013, a High Court judge set aside his death sentence and changed it to life imprisonment with 24 strokes of the cane. The prosecution then appealed, and in early 2015 the Court of Appeal sent him back to death row in a 3-2 split decision.

The High Court judge had found that there was “no clear sequence of events concerning the attack.” The dissenting judges in the Court of Appeal also found a lack of evidence to determine how Jabing had attacked the victim, and observed that there was “reasonable doubt” as to whether he had acted in a way that exhibited a “blatant disregard for life”.

Regardless of one’s views on capital punishment, I think we can all agree that death penalty cases need to be watertight because of its harsh finality. Wrongful executions can never been rectified, and leave us as guilty of taking a life as those we seek to punish.

How then, do we justify the imposition of the death sentence when there is no unanimity on the bench? When even two of our learned appeal judges have doubts over whether it is safe to impose the death penalty in such a case, can we truly be sure that the punishment is justified?

Before we put someone to death, there can be no doubt. It is unsafe to send someone to the gallows when even High Court and Court of Appeal judges do not feel like there is enough evidence to make such a sentence appropriate.