keninabu!

Dead man hung

So the Australian drug smuggler Nguyen Trong Van has just been executed, according to the Beeb.

A cursory examination of the Straits Times reveals a heavily pro-government stance about this, with many letters submitted to the Forum supporting the execution of the smuggler.

The issue here isn't the crime: there is no doubt that Nguyen was guilty as charged. There was no contest that he had been caught with the drugs, that he had intended to deliver those drugs. The key issue, really, is about the mitigation pleas.

There have been letters written to the Singapore press along the lines of "he should have known better", "the laws are very clear on this", "the drugs he carried would harm thousands of others". Some were pedantic, along the lines of "the law cannot be bent for one person clearly in the wrong: otherwise nobody will respect the law". Harsher letters criticizing the calls for clemency were written along the lines of "the hypocrisy of those asking for clemency", because they were "completely silent on the death penalty for the Bali bombers".

All well and fine, if you are not the person involved and if none of your family members are involved. But the moment your personal relatives are involved, I am willing to bet that these people will sing a very different tune. All these arguments with logic and reason suddenly get thrown out of the window, under the assault of emotions when they themselves (or their loved ones, who are emotional extensions of themselves) come under attack.

It is just the nature of the human mind. It is extremely easy to become judgemental and opinionated about others, with a strong vocal sense of self-righteousness, when you are viewing something objectively from an emotionally safe distance.

Thus, it is easy to tell your friend that he is an idiot for falling for a prostitute. Or to chastise him for breaking up with his wife to be with his mistress. Or to scorn him for cheating.

But then when you find yourself under the same situation, with your mind emotionally turmoiled and troubled, bubbling and boiling like steamboat soup, suddenly things do not become so clear anymore. When your mind becomes attached to something, and that attachment becomes attacked by others, things are no longer clear.

In this case, I think that all these critics, in their hurry to condemn others, are forgetting that they are really not different from him.

Nor, for that matter, are they different from the other convicts in prison.

The one major difference is that those behind bars and on the death row acted on their emotions; the rest of us fantasize of the same things when we are angry, scared or emotionally turmoiled, the only difference being that we have not yet done anything about it. But we could, and who knows, we just might. To illustrate a point, suppose someone were to attack your mother, and in your defense of her you killed the attacker. Strictly speaking, that is murder as well. The only difference is that the law is written such that you are not charged with that, but the end result is still that you have killed.

And I am pretty sure many of these hard-hearted people have, at some point in their lives, imagined such a scenario, of having to kill someone.

So why, then, do they speak of Nguyen as though they are themselves faultless, when they are mentally capable of being killers themselves?

The main point is, we are really not that different, and we are just as capable of heinous crimes as those who are convicted.

All this high-handedness and staking of the moral high ground is really inappropriate, in this light.

In the end, I pity his mother, who must be suffering to no end as of now.

I can only hope that her surviving twin son will reform and not let his now-deceased brother down.

posted by keninabu @ 6:04 PM