Responding to the Minister's comments on the mandatory death penalty

The Court of Appeal's decision in the Yong Vui Kong case still isn't out yet, but the Law Minister has made some comments defending the mandatory death penalty.

Here's one of the things he said:

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?

There are two arguments buried here:

1. Having the mandatory death penalty improves safety and security. 
2. The mandatory death penalty is justified because drug trafficking causes "damage".

Let's try and flesh out the first argument. How does having the mandatory death penalty improve safety and security? The argument probably flows like this: the mandatory death penalty deters people from trafficking in drugs, so drug-related crime is reduced.

What about the second argument? Fleshed out, it probably flows similarly: drug trafficking causes increased drug addiction and associated social fall-out (the "damage"); a mandatory death penalty would deter drug trafficking and thereby reduce drug addiction and social fall-out.

What do these two arguments have in common? They are both premised on one proposition: that having a mandatory death penalty deters drug trafficking. But does it really? This is a proposition that can be empirically tested (statisticians and criminologists will tell you how). But this kind of testing has not been done in Singapore. The Government, which has the capability to carry out such testing, has not done so. Instead, it continually asserts that the mandatory death penalty has deterrent effect, without ever citing any empirical evidence. Merely asserting something over and over again does not make it true.

You might say it is common sense that a mandatory death penalty will deter drug trafficking. But research in this area has shown that we should not be so quick to trust what some people claim is common sense. While no study has been done on the death penalty for drug trafficking in Singapore, at least one study has been done on the death penalty for murder. The study suggests that in Singapore, the mandatory death penalty does not have a deterrent effect on murder. In other parts of the world, too, scholars are agreed that the death penalty has no deterrent effect on murder. One cannot extrapolate from these studies about murder and conclude that the mandatory death penalty has no deterrent effect on drug trafficking, but these studies do give us reason to doubt that conclusion. Add to this the fact that mandatory sentencing itself, regardless of the type of punishment involved, has been shown to have no deterrent effect. Are we so sure of 'common sense' now?

The first two arguments, therefore, stand on shaky ground. I wouldn't take someone's life if I knew I stood on shaky ground. I don't think I am unique in this respect, either.

The Minister also said:

If we say, we'll let you go, what is the signal we're sending? We're 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. This poor lady, she's a mother of three young children, she only did it because she had to save her children. Or this young boy, he didn't know what he was doing. Then you will get 10 more. You will get a whole unstoppable stream of such people coming through.

First, we need to get past the rhetoric. Doing away with the mandatory nature of the death penalty does not mean 'letting people go'. They will not get off scot-free just because the death penalty is not mandatory. What will happen is that judges will decide how these criminals should be punished. If the judges think that these criminals were particularly blameworthy, they may be sentenced to death. If the judges think that they weren't that blameworthy, they may be given long terms of imprisonment. Neither of these amounts to 'letting people go'. Don't fall for the rhetoric.

Next, consider how drug barons would choose their mules. If I were a drug baron, I'd choose as mules those people who're less likely to get caught, so that I can use them more often, before they eventually get caught. For this purpose, it would not matter to me whether the person I choose is likely to get hanged or not. After all, once the mule gets caught, she's either going to be hanged, or jailed for a long, long time. Either way, I won't be able to use her as a mule anymore, at least not for the next 15-20 years or so. So what matters to me is her ability to avoid detection, and not whether she is young or has children. The Minister's fear—that abolishing the mandatory death penalty will lead to drug barons choosing more young people and mothers to be drug mules—is therefore likely to be unfounded.

Finally, notice the implicit admission in the Minister's comments: the people we hang are always the mules. We never get the barons. If you really wanted to reduce drug trafficking and its social ills, you'd go for the barons, not the mules. Even if the mandatory death penalty had deterrent effects, these are going to be merely minimal if the penalty is only awarded to mules. Perhaps what is truly crucial in the fight against drugs is not the mandatory death penalty, but better investigative capabilities, which allow us to capture the barons instead. Perhaps, the mandatory death penalty, which has no demonstrated deterrent effect and is always applied to mules only, just isn't such an indispensable part of the anti-drug strategy after all, and we should stop pretending that abolishing it is going to plunge Singapore into utter chaos.

Related posts:

• Shanmugam's Slippery Slope (Benjamin Cheah)
• Fuzzy Logic on the death penalty (Groundnotes)
• Capital punishment in Singapore for drug-related offences (SpotlightOnSingapore)
• Judgement on Yong Vui Kong’s appeal this Friday (The Online Citizen)
• Death Penalty – Are we trading off justice for real deterrence? (Mathia Lee)
• Against The “Trade-Off” (Ambiguity) 
• Shanmugam's misleading defense of the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking (Trapper's Swamp) 
• Singapore official and media claim liberal cities are hotspots for drugs and crimes (Political Duo-ble) 
• Drug lords may gain from death penalty (Tan Chin Aik)
• The slippery slope, the greasy pole (Andrew Loh)
• The death penalty myopia (Kirsten Han)

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