An example of the reasoning and awareness of those electing Singapore's sick killer government

Lisa Millar, reporting for ABC's AM radio program (23 November), interviewed a sample of Singaporeans on the street about the impending judicial murder of Nguyen Tuong Van. The majority of those questioned supported Singapore's government's determination to push on - regardless of any appeal to mercy and ordinary reason - to kill a person they hijacked on transit through their airport - an airport that must be one of the most dangerous places anywhere for Australians. Here is what some of them said:

SINGAPOREAN 1: I think the majority of Singaporeans would support the sentence, and I think Singaporeans – if I can speak for them – I think are, we are not hard people, we are not cruel people, we are not merciless, what is barbarians, you know.

SINGAPOREAN 2: I do not think that the punishment is, in itself, barbaric. A punishment is, in itself, a deterrent. And I think, in the interests of Singaporeans who live in Singapore, we need to be protected also from traffickers and from abusing…

SINGAPOREAN 3: Our children needs to be protected.

SINGAPOREAN 4: The law has to apply to everybody. If you do it wrong you have to suffer. I think that's the way, yeah. It may sound cruel, but we have to respect the law.

My reply to these cavalier unthinking comments is:

1. According to any measure of ordinary human reasoning, hijacking a young person in transit and killing him for a foolish mistake, a mistake that represents an infinitesimal spot in the enormous social problem of drug taking, is indisputably cruel, merciless and barbaric. And those people who are determined not to be swayed by the evident nature of this moral crime are amongst the hardest people on earth.

2. Singapore's cruel policy of hanging ordinary people for drug offences has been a total failure. That is an empirical truth.

3. Not one of Singapore's children, nor anyone else in Singapore, is affected by someone who never intended to enter Singapore.

4. Not only does one not have to respect a bad law, one is morally obligated to act to expunge it from the law books.

5. If one does wrong, then one has to pay a penalty. Watch my lips Singapore: this is not about penalties in general for wrong-doing. This is about a particular insane, unjust penalty for a particular wrong-doing. Have these people never heard of proportion in applying justice?