Plumbing the depths with Singapore’s death penalty

Just the one story today because, honestly, after following the horrible twist and turns of the past couple of days… the other things I planned to write about just didn’t seem as important.

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Every time I think I’ve seen it all, that it can’t possibly get more cold-hearted or agonising, Singapore’s death penalty regime pulls something new and horrifying out of the hat.

This is what I can tell you, to the best of my knowledge:

A Singaporean death row prisoner was issued an execution notice on Monday, 29 July 2024, informing him and his family that his execution had been scheduled for Friday, 2 August. This was less time than the seven days families usually get, during which they’re allowed daily visits up to the late afternoon of the day before the hanging. I don’t know why the prison gave this family a shorter notice period. Also, as pointed out in the Transformative Justice Collective’s post, the execution notice was also dated a day before the written judgment was delivered for a case that the prisoner had brought.

There have been some exceptions, but executions in Singapore usually take place around 6am, around the time yawning, bleary-eyed kids climb on board school buses and the city begins to stir. But on Friday morning I received news that the execution had not taken place that morning. It'd been postponed—it wasn't known for how long. I later found out that the prisoner had filed an application to the court the night before, after his family’s last visit.

What followed was a day of waiting. I can only imagine how agonising it must have been for the prisoner and his loved ones, just waiting for an update—not knowing what would come out of the application he’d filed, not knowing how the court would respond or what it would lead to or what the authorities would do next. I later received news that the prisoner had ultimately been hanged some time in the late afternoon, around the time many of us begin to get restless at work and start to count down the hours and minutes until the end of the day. (CNB eventually published a statement confirming the execution.) While an afternoon execution is unusual, it’s not without precedent. In 2016, Kho Jabing attended a final hearing in the Court of Appeal on the morning of his scheduled execution; soon after the court dismissed the application, he was taken back to prison and hanged at about three in the afternoon.

As TJC noted, the prisoner who was killed yesterday was party to a civil appeal, involving multiple death row prisoners, that has a hearing scheduled for September. The court’s position is that the outcome of that appeal will have no bearing on this prisoner’s conviction or sentence anyway, so there was no need to stay his execution.

I sent the following questions to the Singapore Prison Services yesterday afternoon:

• Can you confirm that an execution took place today?
• I understand that the prisoner was not executed at the usual time this morning. What was the cause for the postponement?
• Was the prisoner’s family allowed to go into the prison today to visit him again, since the execution did not take place early in the morning? If not, why not?

Apart from some out-of-office auto-responses, I've received no reply from SPS. The first question was later answered by the CNB's statement and we can deduce the answer to the second. I can only make an educated guess about the third at the moment, which is why I thought it important to hear it directly from SPS. I will update everyone if they ever get back to me. But I'm not expecting much.

What more can I say about the breathtaking cruelty of this system that I haven’t said before? Yet it feels like repetition is necessary, because we can’t grow numb to such instances of state violence. We should be shocked every time they demonstrate such blatant disregard for human life and dignity, for the trauma and pain of families left hanging and fretting over their loved one’s fate only to eventually be told to report to the prison at a certain time to officially identify and collect cold bodies that should still have been warm.

I can’t tell you what yesterday was like for this prisoner, his family, and all the other prisoners on death row witnessing this horror while fearing for their own lives. I don’t think any of us can begin to imagine what such a nightmare can feel like. What I can say, though, is that what happened yesterday was a special sort of fucked-up, one I’d not seen before in the 14 years I’ve been tracking the use of the death penalty in Singapore. Then again…

…issuing multiple execution notices one after another for prisoners who are still party to ongoing legal proceedings—putting families through overwhelming distress—then granting stays of execution a day or two before, is a special sort of fucked-up.

…keeping prisoners waiting (on Zoom!) for seven hours for a court ruling before telling the one scheduled to hang that there would be no stay of execution was a special sort of fucked-up.

…putting an execution on hold because the prisoner has tested positive for Covid-19—and was therefore deemed too sick to kill—but refusing to recognise his psychosocial disabilities was a special sort of fucked-up.

…sending out an execution notice, followed by pages and pages of Covid-19 regulations, in the middle of a pandemic was a special sort of fucked-up.

As long as capital punishment exists in Singapore, there will be a never-ending series of special sorts of fucked-up. The death penalty is cruel and inhumane, and as long as the state insists on playing God, it will continue to twist and contort itself to retain this power.

I’d really appreciate it if you read TJC’s post in full, but I’d especially like to quote this here:

The death penalty regime has never been about justice, fairness, or keeping Singaporeans safe. It is about showing off state power. The state often reminds us that they are the only ones who can set—and change—the rules, making it harder and harder for those fighting for their lives to push back against this cruel practice. We are told it is an “abuse of process” when the state’s plans to kill are disrupted by a prisoner’s appeal to the court, but when it comes to achieving the state’s goals, it seems as if processes are malleable after all—they can simply change the laws. The more that those on death row, their families and ordinary Singaporeans challenge the death penalty, the more the state doubles down on its stance.

With capital punishment, the state grants itself maximum discretion to callously determine when people can live to fight another day, and when they have to die.