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Unveiling Singapore’s Death Penalty Discourse: A Critical Analysis of Public Opinion and Deterrent Claims

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While Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) maintains a firm stance on the effectiveness of the death penalty in managing drug trafficking in Singapore, the article presents evidence suggesting that the methodologies and interpretations of these studies might not be as substantial as portrayed.

Jones v Chappell: Justice delayed

San Quentin's brand new, multi-million dollar
death chamber. "Of the 900 people California has
sentenced to death since1978, only 13 have been
executed. The last person to be put to death was in 2006."
"A man is undone by waiting for capital punishment," Albert Camus wrote, "well before he dies." On July 16th a federal judge in California, Cormac Carney, ruled in Jones v Chappell that the machinery of death in the Golden State is so plagued by delays and arbitrariness that it amounts to a "cruel and unusual punishment" in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the federal constitution. Judge Carney struck down Ernest Jones's 1995 death sentence for raping and killing his girlfriend's mother, along with the capital sentences of 747 other convicts. Awaiting execution for decades "with complete uncertainty as to when, or even whether, it will ever come," Judge Carney wrote, is a punishment "no rational jury or legislature could ever impose."

Of the 900 people California has sentenced to death since 1978, only 13 have been executed. The last person to be put to death was in 2006. The same year, a federal court ruled that California's mode of lethal injection carried a risk that "an inmate will suffer pain so extreme" that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. With Judge Carney's ruling, the state's system of capital punishment has been judged doubly infirm. The average prisoner who is executed in California has spent 25 years on death row - much longer than the national average of 15.8 years. Such long delays make it unlikely that capital punishment deters other potential murderers, ruled Judge Carney, or delivers effective retribution.

Legal observers are surprised by the broad sweep of the ruling but divided about its potential impact. For James Ching, a former deputy attorney general in California, Judge Carney's opinion is "quixotic" and errs by attributing all the tarrying to California state courts when federal courts are responsible for "46.2% of the total delay and dysfunction". The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Mr Ching suggested, will likely regard Judge Carney's decision sceptically when the state appeals.

But Gil Garcetti, a former Los Angeles County district attorney, has said the Jones ruling is "truly historic" and demonstrates that "the death penalty is broken beyond repair." California may have the largest and slowest-moving death row in the country, but it is not the only state where condemned prisoners are more likely to die of old age than be executed. The central point in Judge Carney's opinion, says Diann Rust-Tierney, head of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, is "not simply the length of time" between conviction and execution. "It is the unpredictability."

Stephen Bright of the Southern Centre for Human Rights says that the California death penalty is "uniquely dysfunctional" (a term Judge Carney used eight times) and "will collapse of its own weight eventually." If and when the challenge reaches the Supreme Court, it is unclear how it will fare. Justice Stephen Breyer has been receptive to the delay argument in the past and this March Justice Anthony Kennedy asked the Florida solicitor general whether he thought waiting 35 years to die was "consistent with the purposes that the death penalty is designed to serve." Mr Bright has few doubts which way the wind is blowing. Judge Carney's decision, he says, "has added to the conversation in a way that will lead to the inevitable end of the death penalty in California and the United States."

Source: The Economist, July 22, 2014

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