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The Jolly Hangman, the Jailed Journalist, and the Decline of Singapore’s Death Penalty

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Abstract

British journalist Alan Shadrake was convicted of contempt of court in 2010 for writing a book about capital punishment in Singapore. This article uses that book and other sources to analyze four aspects of Singapore’s death penalty. It begins with a profile of Darshan Singh, the hangman who executed 1,000 persons over the past half-century. The article then shows that Singapore’s system of mandatory capital punishment does not produce consistency in death penalty decision-making. Next the article argues that the prosecution of Shadrake increased criticism of capital punishment in Singapore by propelling his book to bestseller status. This is followed by an explanation of why the number of persons executed in Singapore has declined in recent years, from an average of 66 per year in the mid-1990s to an average of 5 per year since 2004. The key proximate cause of this decline appears to be prosecutors, who can use their discretion to charge defendants for possessing amounts of heroin, cannabis, cocaine, and methamphetamine that are just under the thresholds for a mandatory death sentence. Capital punishment in Singapore is not really mandatory, and it cannot escape the problems of bias and arbitrariness that have long plagued discretionary death penalty systems in the United States, Japan, and other nations.

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Notes

  1. Quoted in Seow 2006:vi.

  2. Quoted in Mydans and Arnold 2007.

  3. For more details on the comparison between Singapore and Hong Kong, see Zimring et al. 2010, and for a critique of that study and others on the death penalty and deterrence, see Nagin and Peppers 2012.

  4. This article usually cites the first edition of Shadrake’s book (2010) because it is the version that led to his criminal conviction. The second edition (2011) differs from the first in three main ways. First, it is shorter, mostly because it omits the chapters on British serial killer John Martin Scripps, “the tourist from hell” who was hanged in Singapore in 1996 (Chap. 22), and on relations between Singapore and Myanmar, which is (according to Shadrake) involved in a “booming billion dollar drug trade” that Singapore’s government tolerates or condones (Chap. 23). Second, the revised edition contains some new material, including a Foreword by Australian barrister Julian Burnside and two short chapters describing Shadrake’s arrest, trial, and sentencing. Third, following Shadrake’s conviction for contempt of court, the copyright page of the revised edition now states “THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR SALE OR IMPORT INTO SINGAPORE.”

  5. Shadrake (2010) provides several accounts of the execution total: “Singh estimates he has executed around 1,000 men and women” (p. 11); Singh is “not really sure” about the number and says it “can be over 1,000 [and] can be under” (p. 12); and Singh says the number is “around 900 to 1,000 executions since 1959” (p. 46). In an article published the year before Singh retired, Shadrake (2005) reported that Singh had “spoken to more than 850 condemned prisoners during his 46 years as Singapore’s chief executioner.”

  6. Pierrepoint’s career execution total could be higher than 435 (Fielding 2008). The closing credits of the film Pierrepoint (directed by Adrian Shergold and released in 2006) say he performed 608 executions, while Pierrepoint’s assistant Syd Dernley (Dernley and Newman 1990) said he had hanged more than 680 people.

  7. Singh also says he is the world’s fastest hangman, having once executed seven persons in 90 minutes (NationMaster 2012).

  8. In Singapore, the judge who condemns a person to death wears a black cap at the time of sentencing, and a typical pronouncement goes something like this: “The sentence of this court upon you is that you will be taken from this place to a lawful prison to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul” (Shadrake 2010:56–57). Between sentence and execution, condemned inmates live in an “8-foot by 6-foot windowless cell, lit 24 hours with a camera monitoring” them constantly (Shadrake 2010:196). Unlike Japan and Taiwan, last meals and last visits are allowed in some cases, but family and friends of the condemned are not permitted to be present at the hanging.

  9. Criminologist Peter Moskos has argued “in defense of flogging” for the United States. He believes America should “poach expert floggers from Singapore and Malaysia,” to carry out canings themselves and to train the country’s own crew of capable floggers (Moskos 2011:134). For an argument that America should not go “back to the future” of corporal punishment, see Simon 1985, and for a video with graphic scenes from a caning in Malaysia, see http://www.corpun.com/vidju2.htm.

  10. Convicts who have been sentenced to death cannot be caned in Singapore.

  11. This is a dubious claim. In the United States, about 5 % of the executions carried out between 1977 and 2001 were “botched” in one way or another (Borg and Radelet 2004), and executions in Japan and other nations that hang sometimes result in deaths that are prolonged, painful, or both (Goto et al. 2011). Singh says that under his predecessor (B. Seymour), “things often went wrong” (Shadrake 2010:40).

  12. Pierrepoint’s conversion against capital punishment troubled his long-time assistant Syd Dernley, who said in his own autobiography: “I do not think I will ever get over the shock of reading in [Pierrepoint’s] autobiography, many years ago, that like the Victorian executioner James Berry before him, he had turned against capital punishment and now believed that none of the executions he had carried out had achieved anything!…I just could not believe it. When you have hanged more than 680 people, it’s a hell of a time to find out you do not believe capital punishment achieves anything!” (Dernley and Newman 1990). It is “a hell of a time” indeed, though some Justices of the US Supreme Court have had similar post-retirement conversions (Steiker 2009; Dow 2010). Pierrepoint continued to express ambivalence about capital punishment even after his conversion. When BBC Radio asked him in 1976 about some heinous murder cases he said “Oh I could go again.”

  13. Singh may be acknowledging doubts about the death penalty when he says he “learned never to ask questions” about it (Shadrake 2010:31), though this silence might also stem from situational imperatives in a society where dissent can be personally costly (Seow 2006). For a moving short story about a Japanese prison official who is haunted by memories of a hanging in which he participated, see Akira Yoshimura’s “Kyuka” (Holiday). There is also a film by the same name, directed by Hajime Kadoi and released in 2008.

  14. Singh’s execution total of 1,000 is 25 times higher than the number of persons (40) the hangman in Uttar Pradesh (India’s most populous state, with 200 million people) has executed since 1965, and the latter has not performed any executions in “over two decades” (The Economist 2012). The country of India, with a population more than 200 times greater than Singapore and serious problems with lethal violence, has carried out only one judicial execution since 1998, though extrajudicial killings by agents of the state are common (Johnson and Zimring 2009:423).

  15. In October 2010, when Shadrake was on trial, the Malaysian publisher of Once a Jolly Hangman reported that the criminal case against him increased sales of his book at least fivefold, and predicted that it would become the company’s bestseller to date (Gomez 2010).

  16. A similar dynamic of status and shame helps explain the decline of executions in the People’s Republic of China (Hood 2009). As University of Hong Kong Professor Borge Bakken (2007:182) has observed, “The fact that China today executes many more people than the rest of the world combined is one that today perhaps shames the country internationally more than any other single question.” More generally, the psychology of honor—the giving and receiving of respect—often plays a central role in moral revolutions (Appiah 2010).

  17. On several occasions, solicitors Saul Lehrfreund and Parvais Jabbar of The Death Penalty Project in London have helped local attorneys doing capital defense and appeals in Singapore. See http://www.deathpenaltyproject.org/content_pages/1.

  18. For descriptions of these and other “14.99” cases, see The Death Penalty in Singapore blog at http://sgdeathpenalty.blogspot.com/p/1499g-charge.html.

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Correspondence to David T. Johnson.

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David T. Johnson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii, Co-Editor of Law & Society Review, and co-author of The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia (Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Johnson, D.T. The Jolly Hangman, the Jailed Journalist, and the Decline of Singapore’s Death Penalty. Asian Criminology 8, 41–59 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-012-9143-1

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