Lame Duck Executioners

When historians look back and evaluate the Trump presidency, one focus will be the instigation of the federal death penalty. Until the execution of Daniel Lee Lewis on Jan 14, 2020, no federal prisoner had been executed in 17 years. The execution of Lisa Montgomery was even more extreme - no woman had been put to death by the federal government in 67 years, the last one being in 1953.

 A Political Punishment

Apart from restarting federal executions, another quagmire was Trump's insistence on carrying out executions even after election defeat. Whether one supports or opposes the death penalty, both sides can likely agree that it is a political issue. And political issues can bring political rewards. In the United States, prosecutors gain accolades when a sentence of death is pronounced. And then a second time - in the not so usual instance - if the accused is put to death.

Politicians often have much to gain. Preaching that law and order is necessary, and that the death penalty keeps our communities safe, brings donations and votes. Judges who oppose the death penalty draw the wrath of police organizations, and can end up as grass by the wayside.

 The Jilted and the Defeated

Jilted lovers and defeated politicians share similar mindsets. Like Monday morning quarterbacks, 'what did I do wrong, what could I have done better', are questions which dog the mind. Those who lose in love and politics often indulge in drastic actions. And this phenomenon is hardly indigenous to the United States.

In September 2009, The Democratic Party of Japan, an opposition party, took control of the Japanese parliament. It was only the second time in postwar history that the stalwart conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was sidelined. Human rights activists and progressives celebrated the victory. In particular, they welcomed the appointment of (Ms) Keiko Chiba, a practicing attorney, as Justice Minister. Chiba had a firm record of supporting human rights, actively opposed the death penalty, and was a member of a non-partisan abolitionist caucus within the parliament.

Death penalty abolitionists in Japan breathed a sigh of relief. From December 2006 until January 2009 - a period of 25 months - Japan had hung 32 prisoners. The country disposed of nearly one third of its death row. By comparison, the US as a whole would have had to carry out more than 700 executions to keep pace.

On July 11, 2010, ten months after assuming office, Chiba, who had served in parliament off and on since 1996, lost her bid for re-election. It is extremely rare for a sitting minister to lose a race for office in Japan. However, in a somewhat unusual move, she was allowed to remain on as minister of justice until the end of her parliamentary term.

A Shocking Reversal

Some two weeks after defeat, Chiba turned face. She ordered two executions. And to add fuel to the fire, she did something no other justice minister had even contemplated: opening the Tokyo gallows, which had never been photographed, to the press (albeit without the noose).

Executions in Japan are shrouded in secrecy. Prisoners need not be informed of when they will hang, and we surmise that most do not know until the morning of the execution. Until about 10 years ago, the Ministry of Justice did not even make public announcements of executions. The public and relatives of the deceased heard the news after the ministry informed prisoner's attorneys, who then alerted concerned family and human rights organizations.

Say it ain't so Keiko

Chiba's title, Minister of Justice, was a bit of a misnomer. A proper translation of the title 'Ministry of Justice' (Houmusho) is better rendered as the 'Ministry of Laws' (as it is called in the Philippines and in Singapore). The ministry is charged with maintaining the dominant social narrative: citizens should work hard, not complain, avoid litigation, and listen to authority. 'Justice' is hardly part of the agenda.

Quite often, ordering an execution is a rite of passage for new justice ministers. Many authorize them soon after appointment. Executions assuage upper-level bureaucrats, fellow ruling party politicians, as well as the public which supports capital punishment.

From the outset, Chiba refused to execute. Why did she renege? The most likely guess is that the apparatchiks teased, "See what your abolitionist tendencies have wrought? We told you to execute and you ignored us. You should have listened. The Japanese public believe in the death penalty. Now you are a lame duck minister."

Penal Populism

Long before running for office, Donald Trump firmly supported the death penalty. In 1989, he paid for several full-page articles, including in The New York Times, screaming for the reinstitution of the death penalty in New York state. This was revenge against five black men who were then alleged to have attacked a white woman and became known as the Central Park Five.

The Central Park Five were falsely accused. All were later exonerated. One would expect a normal mind to bear remorse for advocating what would have constituted wrongful executions. Or at the very least, to avoid making the same mistake twice.

Donald J. Trump was not of a normal mind. And one wonders if former justice minister Chiba also became temporarily deluded. Be it the US, or Japan, support for the death penalty brings political rewards, and from opposition can foster political reprisals. The US and Japan are the only large, advanced democracies that conduct executions. And until complete abolition is reached in both countries, penal populism - political actors teasing voters with executions and other severe criminal justice policies - will likely continue to woo the public.

Michael H. Fox is associate professor at Hyogo University and director of the Japan Innocence and Death Penalty Information Center (www.jiadep.org)

Trump reportedly praised Singapore for executing drug dealers. Here’s how they’re killed.

Source: The Washington Post (27 February 2018)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/27/trump-reportedly-praised-singapore-for-executing-drug-dealers-heres-how-theyre-killed/?utm_term=.d3e29b3f0884

President Trump has been privately praising Singapore, the small city-state once known as the world's most active executioner per capita.

This is according to Axios, which reported Sunday that the president has been telling friends for months that the death penalty should be imposed on drug dealers in the United States — similar to a policy enforced for decades by Singapore.

An anonymous senior administration official told Axios that the president has also spoken admiringly about the executions of drug traffickers in China and the Philippines, and has said he would love to have a law that allows the United States to execute drug dealers without exception. Axios reporter Jonathan Swan also said Tuesday that Trump has “talked up” executions in China, the Philippines and Singapore to not just confidants but also members of Congress and some foreign leaders. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump's reported comments are consistent with his penchant for embracing no-holds-barred policies and rhetoric on drug crimes, from his Justice Department's directive to federal prosecutors to pursue the harshest penalties possible, to his extraordinary endorsement of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, whose drug war has left thousands of suspected drug dealers dead without as much as a day in court.

But Singapore's unyielding stance on law and order has long raised red flags among human rights groups, especially as more and more countries eliminate the death penalty. Advocates say Singapore's judicial process is often shrouded in secrecy and misinformation and is designed to tip the scales of justice heavily toward prosecutors, who have nearly limitless power over who dies and who is spared.

The method has also been met with harsh criticism.

People convicted of capital offenses in Singapore are executed by hanging, which Kirsten Han, co-founder of an anti-death penalty group in Southeast Asia, described in chilling detail: “A noose — measured according to the individual's height — is placed over the prisoner's head, the knot behind the right ear to ensure the spinal cord is snapped upon the impact of the long drop through the trapdoor.”

Families are never present, just prison officers and doctors.

In a seemingly unusual part of the execution practice in Singapore, those condemned to die are allowed to change into regular clothes the day before they're executed — so they can pose for a picture that will be given to loved ones as a keepsake.


Australia's then-attorney general called the method “a most unfortunate, barbaric act” in 2005, when an Australian heroin trafficker was executed in Changi Prison. Many Australians held candlelit vigils on the eve of Nguyen Tuong Van's execution.

Hanging was the most common method of execution in the United States in the 1800s before widespread adoption of the electric chair. It remains widespread in several countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

It is the lone method of capital punishment in Singapore, where executions are on the decline: The government has executed 24 people over the past decade — 16 of whom were convicted of drug crimes.

Singapore's mandatory death sentence would be imposed equally on a person who trafficked more than 15 grams of heroin and a person who bombed a government building and killed dozens. To place this in context, trafficking a much larger amount of heroin in the United States — 100 to 999 grams — is punishable by five to 40 years in prison.

Similarly, Singapore has some of the world's toughest gun laws. For example, a person who fires a gun, or attempts to fire a gun, while committing a crime in Singapore faces a mandatory death sentence upon conviction — even if nobody is wounded or killed.

“Simply having the keys to a car or to a room or to a house where drugs were found” means that a person is a presumed drug trafficker and, therefore, could face the death penalty, said Chiara Sangiorgio, a death penalty expert for Amnesty International.

Hence, there is no presumption of innocence. The burden of proof is on the accused, who are often poor people far down the drug chain, and foreigners who might not be fluent in the local languages, Sangiorgio said.

Advocates say there's no evidence that executions are any more of a crime deterrent than lesser punishments. In 2009, researchers from Columbia Law School compared murder rates in Singapore and Hong Kong, where capital punishment was abolished in 1993, and found little difference.

But Singaporean officials have long insisted that the specter of death, particularly for drug traffickers, has worked for their city-state.

“Singapore is relatively drug-free, and the administration is under control. There are no drug havens, no no-go zones, no drug production centers, no needle exchange programs,” K. Shanmugam, Singapore's minister of home affairs and law, said in 2016.

A “soft approach,” he said, would flood the island state with narcotics — a line of thinking that appears to be similar to Trump's.

The number of executions every year, however, has significantly dropped, and changes have been adopted.

Singapore, which is about half the size of Los Angeles, executed 76 people in 1994 and 73 in 1995, when the population was just more than 3 million. In 2015 and 2016, there were just eight executions in total on the island — five for people convicted of drug crimes.

Changes in 2013 to Singapore's Misuse of Drugs Act gave judges leeway in sentencing if defendants meet two conditions: (1) they were merely couriers or drug mules and (2) they have greatly cooperated with law enforcement officers by tipping them about other drug traffickers. Alternatively, those who have proven that they are couriers can also be spared if they are mentally or intellectually disabled. A judge can impose lesser sentences, such as life imprisonment and caning — a type of punishment that drew controversy in the United States in 1994, when a 19-year-old American was caned for vandalism.

The revised laws have cut the number of those sentenced to death. According to a recent study by Amnesty International, 38 out of 93 people convicted of murder and drug trafficking from Jan. 1, 2013, were spared from hanging.

Shanmugam, the Singaporean minister, also said last year that the drug trade has hardly flourished since the changes: Officials have caught 90 traffickers since 2012 through the help of drug couriers who cooperate in exchange for leniency, he said.

Eugene K.B. Tan, a professor at the Singapore Management University School of Law, called the revisions “tempering justice with mercy” in a 2016 column for the Straits Times.

“The Government has determined that the mandatory death penalty (MDP) may not be needed for all types of serious crimes. This is an important first step, notwithstanding the attraction and force of the MDP was its unequivocal demonstration of zero tolerance and resolve in maximum deterrence,” Tan wrote. “Yet, the shift to the discretionary death penalty regime should not be misconstrued as Singapore letting up on drug trafficking and murders. Instead, this shift was necessary to retain public confidence and legitimacy in our administration of criminal justice.”

But the revisions did little to ease the concerns of human rights advocates.

Amnesty International analyzed judgments issued by Singapore's High Court and Court of Appeal on the cases of 137 people charged with capital offenses from 2008, five years before the changes took place, to 2017, four years after. The organization said it found that although executions are happening far less often, major human rights violations still occur.

Defense attorneys, for example, are never present during interrogations. In many cases, particularly in the case of foreigners, the statements that lead to conviction were either misrepresented or were lost in translation, Sangiorgio said.

Prosecutors and not the judges still have unchallenged power to decide whether defendants should be spared from the gallows based on their level of cooperation. Prosecutors must first issue what is called a “certificate of substantive assistance,” which confirms that a defendant has given them substantial information about other drug traffickers. Only then can judges decide on a lesser punishment. In many cases, however, defendants can be so far down the drug hierarchy that they do not have any meaningful information to give, Sangiorgio said.

“In other words, people pay with their lives for failing to provide information which they are incapable of providing,” according to the study.

Take, for example, the case of a 32-year-old Malaysian man who was convicted after the Central Narcotics Bureau found him with 16.56 grams of heroin, just above the legal threshold. He told police that a friend had offered to pay him the equivalent of $236 to deliver the heroin. His attorney asked the High Court to consider him a courier, but prosecutors, without explanation, declined to issue a certificate of substantive assistance, leaving the judge with no other choice but to sentence him to death.

Here's how the High Court described the state of affairs in a 2016 ruling on the case of a man who was convicted of trafficking more than 100 grams of heroin:

“He is not given a certificate of substantive assistance.... We do not know why. He might not have much assistance to give. He might have declined to assist, in which event we do not know if his depressive illness had any connection to that attitude.... The language of the law here is precise and simple. Life, on the other hand, is not so. Every life is complex in its own way. The mandatory death penalty has been the law for a long time and I do not think that in providing the changes set out in [Section 33B Parliament] has become more lenient towards drug trafficking. This crime is no less serious today than it was before the amendment.”

Singapore and the United States were among the 40 countries and territories that voted against a United Nations resolution calling for a global moratorium on executions in 2016.

Trump, according to Axios, has acknowledged that executing people for drug offenses would never happen in the United States. In trying to add some nuance to Trump's comments, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who is in charge of the administration's anti-drug efforts, told Axios that the president was talking about drug dealers who cause mass overdose deaths by flooding communities with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid far more potent than heroin or morphine.

“The president makes a distinction between those that are languishing in prison for low-level drug offenses and the kingpins hauling thousands of lethal doses of fentanyl into communities, that are responsible for many casualties in a single weekend,” Conway said.