In Australia the fight is on to increase the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14 from its current Dickensian age of 10.
Meanwhile, Singapore just hanged a man whose mental age was about 10.
Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, a Malaysian national, was caught entering Singapore in 2009 with 42.72 grams of heroin strapped to his body. Under Singapore’s extremely strict drug trafficking laws, that qualified him for the death penalty. After all appeals had failed and clemency was refused, he was executed.
Dharmalingam’s IQ had been measured at 69. On the IQ scale, 100 marks average intelligence. With an IQ of 69, a person will be in the bottom 2% of the population for intelligence and will be considered to have “mental retardation” as it used to be called, or what we’d now identify as severe intellectual disability.
As a general rule, a person with an IQ of Dharmalingam’s level is likely to have the cognitive reasoning ability of an average child who is aged 10 at most. That is to say he was, in intelligence terms, a child. The likelihood that he had any real idea what he was doing when he tried to carry a tiny package of drugs across the border is negligibly low.
For Singapore’s legal system, none of that mattered, despite protests from every human rights organisation in the world. The courts rejected pleas that Dharmalingam suffered a mental disability, ruling that he met the standard for criminal responsibility and knew what he was doing.
Singapore’s case was laid out in a formal response to an urgent appeal from the United Nations bodies that advocate against arbitrary executions and cruel or inhuman treatment, and for people with disabilities.
Specifically on Dharmalingam’s case, Singapore pointed out that the 42 grams of heroin he was carrying is still almost three times the quantity that triggers the death penalty. Its courts had found he was “of borderline intellectual functioning, but did not suffer from mild intellectual disability”.
International law, Singapore contended, does not prohibit the death penalty. That’s true, mainly because most of the most powerful members of the UN still employ capital punishment. For Singapore, it remains what it considers to be a critical element of its criminal justice infrastructure. That is also true, in the sense that you’d have to have the mental age of a 10-year-old to try to import drugs into that country because you’ll almost certainly get caught and then pretty much definitely be executed. It is well known and, at a pragmatic level, it works.
That doesn’t answer the ethical question of whether capital punishment is ever justified, nor the more nuanced question: if it is, then for whom?
I am squarely in the “no” camp for the death penalty, under all circumstances, because I do not believe that an ethical justification can ever be found for taking another person’s life against their will. Nor, I am pleased to say, do most Australians.
It is different elsewhere. As in America, there is strong public support among Singapore’s population for capital punishment as a general concept (about 70%), but that number falls substantially once people are asked about specific case examples.
The National University of Singapore, which conducted the most recent research, noted: “Singaporeans apparently favoured the death penalty despite admitting that they knew very little about it, were not interested in it and could not give an accurate estimate of the number of persons executed.”
The report’s conclusion was that it is unsafe for the government to continue insisting that it needs to retain the death penalty “because the public supports it”. Studies in the US have produced similar results. It’s all unsurprising: “tough on crime” sentiment is always many times stronger in the abstract than when its real-life consequences come into focus.
On the more granular question — if we execute people, where should the line be drawn — Singapore would say that its stance is consistent with human rights protections. It does not execute juveniles, or people with mental disability. It’s just that Dharmalingam didn’t meet that test.
For me, the fact that one has to even ask such a question is grotesque. Dharmalingam was, in theory, one expert report away from being allowed to live.
The history books overflow with case studies of children, and adults with children’s brains, who were put to death for crimes they either didn’t commit or couldn’t understand. Drawing lines, on one side of which is the extinguishment of life, is beyond human capacity and should be beyond our presumption of right.
I expect that Dharmalingam’s tragic death will have one positive effect, in that it will be cited from now on as proof of the ethical point which, I hope, will one day motivate Singapore to abolish capital punishment.
Singapore has form on this.
Remember when they put Nguyen Tuong Van to death for drug trafficking.
Singapore is an autocratic, class ridden society. The Chinese, own the place, the Indians provide the lawyers and the Malays provide the grunt. And that’s just how it will always be because it suits the ruling elites just nicely.
And we let this country own critical Australian infrastructure. SP Ausnet for a start.
And when are we to get a government with enough cojones to put a stop if not reversal of foreign monopoly ownership of vital infrastructure, media etc..probably not in my lifetime.
Not to mention that we rely upon it for refined petroleum – apart from the security stockpile so cleverly stashed in Texas for only $160M by Angas Taylor.
But they are a Democrazy….
Even better, Singapore supports Myanmar, one of the biggest heroin production areas on the planet, then executes people who carry it’s client’s product!.
I am against the death penalty. I wholeheartedly disagree with this man/child being put to death. I wonder if he even understood what was happening. What of the traffickers that bound this man/child? Have they been caught? They are the ones that should be facing retribution.
I remember battling with myself, if asked would I be for or against the death penalty for those found guilty of the horrific murder of Anita Cobby. I was fence sitting for quite a while. In the end I decided the bastards should rot and hopefully suffer (I know, I’m not always tolerant) in prison for their natural lives, no ifs, no buts and definitely no freedom.
And at great expense to the community!
Another positive effect is as a deterrent. Unless one is pro-heroin trafficking. I am against the death penalty, but let’s face it death is a bigger deterrent than prison.
As a paramedic I once went to a dead woman who had OD’d, arriving at the same time as the primary school bus with her two children on it.
If heroin was legally controlled both she and this guy in Singapore (and a few others) would still be alive.
If one takes the time to study why people get addicted to heroine and other mind altering substances they would find that for every addict there is a probability of 80% that that child has been abused in its early years. The abuse is usually by the parents, but sometimes about 10% of the time the abuse occurs through circumstance. There is a genetic component, some children’s brains and physiology provide some protection from adversity that other children don’t have. But this is a second order effect; not the dominant case.
A good starting point for those who like to understand why things occur rather than ascribe some morality based cuase I urge you to start with the Adverse Childhood Experiences study by Vince Felliti and Robert Anda.
You might also look at the Whitehall Studies and Robert Sapolsky’s studies of toxic stress to get a better understanding of the problem. There is plenty of other research reaching the same conclusions, but I’m not going to list them here. They are easy to find.
Of course the notion that people become drug addicted by choice is a great idea. We can then blame the victim and feel all morally righteous about ourselves. The problem is that the choice argument is false unless one takes the position that the worst choice a drug addict ever took was to choose his/her parents and the circumstances they found themselves in.
If we lived in a society where community took precedence over the individual, one where vulnerable children were identified and helped by caring non-familial adults, then a lot of the self medication for stress and anxiety relief using dangerous drugs would be avoided.
Thanks for that sobering reminder, Robert.
The other side to the brutal, ineffective and life-destroying ‘war on drugs’ is its genesis. Richard Nixon’s Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, John Ehrlichman, gave the game away in an interview with Harper’s Magazine in 2016:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The death penalty is clearly not a deterrent or countries with the death penalty would have wiped out the types of crime for which it is applied. The lack of logic in that stance is so obvious that I’m surprised people still posit it.
At any rate, even if it was a deterrent, it’s questionable whether someone with an iq of 69 would be able to comprehend that.
No argument about Singapore, but please don’t tell me that that the 11 year old who climbed over my boss’s back fence, smashed the window and stole money and a laptop didn’t know it w as wrong. I disagrgee with the death penalty although some clearly deserve it, but some are executed that are innocent and that has certainly happened in Australia.
As to the age argument, some action must be taken and I do not mean lock up a 10 year old. A 10 year old thief needs a kick in the bum- tribal one maybe and the parents need to do some explaining. But we laud Singapore as a model of public order and educational success. Perhaps we need to look at the whole equation.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that preteens get away scot free, just that their responsibility can’t be treated as like an adults.
An IQ of 69 is not severely intellectually disabled. Intellectual disability is 70 or below, he only just makes into the definition at a mild level.
Still wrong, but please do your research.