You’re reading a special issue of We, The Citizens. Special issues are usually only emailed to Milo Peng Funders and might even be paywalled on the website, but I sometimes send important or urgent ones to all subscribers.
What are Sunday mornings for? Sleeping in, going to church, children clamouring for play or cartoons on TV. Lounging on sofas, brunch with friends, doing laundry for the week. Sunday mornings are supposed to be about rest and ease.
Yesterday morning in Kuala Lumpur, Pannir Selvam Pranthaman’s family received the news that his execution has been scheduled for Thursday morning (20 February), giving them a mere four days’ notice. They'd some inkling that a notice could arrive soon, but they’d just come to Singapore to visit him the day before and there’d been no indication then. Why let them go all the way back to Malaysia before blindsiding them like this? Because capital punishment is both literal and bureaucratic violence, unfathomably cruel in every conceivable way.
Cutting time short
Death row prisoners in Singapore usually get seven days’ notice of their execution—for example, if a hanging has been scheduled for Friday morning, the prisoner and their family should be informed the Friday before. But the Ministry of Home Affairs changed this in June 2024. Under their new protocol, prisoners who'd previously received execution notices will be given less time.
This is an excerpt from a Court of Appeal judgment issued on 3 October 2024 (emphasis mine):
Mr Sanjay Nanwani (“Mr Nanwani”), Senior Director of the Policy Development Division, MHA, explained MHA’s practice of notifying a [Prisoner Awaiting Capital Punishment] in advance of the PACP’s scheduled execution. Mr Nanwani stated as follows:
(a) The practice of giving advanced notice of the date of execution is to provide the PACP an opportunity to attend to any final matters before the PACP’s execution. To facilitate these arrangements, PACPs are given special visitation privileges and other special requests by the PACP will be considered.
(b) The existing practice prior to June 2024 was that all PACPs would be given at least a seven-day notification period, even if it were a renotification of an execution that was rescheduled (ie, where a PACP has his or her execution rescheduled to a later date) (the “Renotification Period”). In June 2024, MHA reviewed this practice. It was then determined that if a PACP had previously been notified of a scheduled execution and had their execution stayed or halted by respite past the halfway mark of their notification period, the PACP would be given a reduced Renotification Period. Under the reviewed practice, every PACP will still receive at least seven days in total to settle their affairs.
What does “settle their affairs” mean for someone like Pannir, who has been on death row for almost eight years? For most prisoners, the notice period is mainly about seeing family and friends. Contact visits are banned so they can’t hug or touch—yet another cold-blooded policy in our death penalty regime—but they make the most of visits to talk, reminisce, comfort each other. I’ve heard so many times about how prisoners choose to laugh and joke during these visits, soothing their loved ones, telling them not to cry. “He’s trying to be strong, he doesn’t want us to feel sad,” they tell me. “But that’s him during the visit; we can’t know what it’s like for him back in his cell.” However they might be when they’re alone surrounded by those harsh concrete walls, the time they have during the daily visits in that final week are about reliving old moments, sharing space, committing voices and faces to memory, finding ways to communicate love. There’s no way that the Ministry of Home Affairs, informed by the Singapore Prison Service that oversees these visits, doesn’t know this.
What's the justification for reducing this notice period? Does a prisoner who spent a few days trying to say goodbye to his dearest ones before his execution was put on hold have less of a need to spend time with his family the next time the authorities plan for his death, whether it’s a year later, or two, or five? Pannir’s last execution notice was in 2019—six years ago. In that time, his parents have aged, children have been born, his sisters have pushed themselves to the limit fighting and advocating for him. But MHA’s position is that, because he’d narrowly avoided the gallows once, he doesn’t deserve another seven days to be with them?
I can’t see a reason for this review that isn’t just petty viciousness. The prison has, for years, facilitated seven-day notice periods ahead of an execution. They still do this when prisoners are served with their first notices, so we know the capacity is there. There’s no conceivable reason why this seven-day practice would suddenly become challenging or impossible for a prisoner simply because it wasn’t his first time. The only reason I can think of is that the authorities just want to reduce the time (and therefore opportunity) for prisoners and their families to react, to fight, to challenge. A reduced notification period is a clear indication from the state that they are tired of you, that they are impatient with your existence, that they can’t, won’t, wait any more to take your life.
This is the power and violence of the state that we live under in Singapore.
Measuring time
It’s taking far longer than it should for me to write this. I’m struggling to focus with all this nervous energy coursing through my body. My mind is buzzing restlessly—telling me that to do something, anything, for Pannir—but won’t settle to let me write this one thing that is actually about Pannir. Again and again I check the time. 10:30am. 11am. 11:45am. 12:20pm. His family are in Changi Prison now. Half the visitation day is over. Tomorrow will be Tuesday. Then it’ll be Wednesday. Then, unless we get the miracle we’re all praying for, it might be over. I write ‘might’ because I cannot bring myself to use ‘will’.
If this is how it feels for me, how does it feel for Pannir’s family? How did it feel for Syed’s family and the two other families who received notices this year, for all the families who’ve been put through this hell over the years and decades?
When an execution notice is delivered, you become acutely aware of time. Of how quickly it slips through your fingers, of how loudly a clock can tick. A “reduced Renotification Period” is especially callous when you consider that the original seven days was already not enough. When you think about how depraved it is to even try to determine—much less implement—how much is ‘enough’ time to give someone notice of their impending murder.
How much time is ‘enough’ for a mother to say goodbye to her son, knowing that he'll be taken away and killed?
How much time is ‘enough’ for a sister to speak to her brother, receiving instructions for funeral arrangements from a healthy, able-bodied man?
How much time is ‘enough’ for a child to stare at their father from behind a pane of glass and grasp the magnitude of what’s happening?
How much time is ‘enough’ for a man to trace with his eyes the soft chubby cheeks of a niece or nephew he’d never had the chance to cuddle, and sit with the knowledge that he will likely never, ever, have that chance?
Time is merciless and waits for no one. But it’s nowhere near as ruthless as the people who’ve seized the power to apportion the amount of time others can live—and those of us who let them.
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