A name on death row, a system without mercy

Across the causeway, in Singapore, a young Malaysian man would have woken up today knowing he is one day closer to being hanged.

His crime? Being a drug courier – a disposable pawn in the vast machinery of the narcotics trade.

He was neither the mastermind nor the profiteer, but someone hard-up and jobless in a country that looks away from his plight and that of others. And yet, it is his neck that will bear the weight of the rope and his needs.

The law does not see him as a victim of coercion or desperation. It does not ask whether he had a choice. It does not consider the powerful figures who remain untouched, who traffic in death without ever facing it themselves. The law sees no difference between kingpin and errand boy. And so he waits.

We like to believe that justice is blind, that it weighs the scales impartially, that it would balance the cause of the action that makes the crime with the crime. But justice, when it kills, is not blind – it too looks the other way and is wilfully indifferent.

In the book The Savage God, Al Alvarez explores the intimate and societal dimensions of suicide. But his observations on death extend beyond the personal. He writes:

Mass killing, whether in war, revolution, or terror, numbs the mind to the individual reality of death. It becomes an abstraction, a statistic, a moral argument rather than a human loss.

This is precisely how the death penalty functions. It turns a life – full of history, regrets and small hopes – into a case number, a sentence, an execution date.

The young man awaiting death in Singapore is no longer a person in the eyes of the law; he has become an example, a warning, a cold legal precedent to support more hanging.

Governments that enforce capital punishment tell us it is necessary, that it deters crime, that it delivers justice.

But as Albert Camus countered in Reflections on the Guillotine:

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists.

If execution worked as a deterrent, the gallows would have emptied long ago. Instead, the hangman’s rope remains busy. This is not justice. This is ritual. A performance of retribution that does nothing to address the roots of crime—poverty, exploitation, addiction and the vast inequalities that ensure the most vulnerable are invariably the ones who pay the ultimate price.

Those who still defend the death penalty may say: “He knew the risks. He made his choice. Let the law take its course.”

But to them, I ask, do we trust our institutions enough to kill in their name? Do we believe in their infallibility?

History has shown us time and again that the law is not flawless. Courts convict the innocent. Corruption skews verdicts. Power shields the guilty.

The death penalty does not always kill criminals; it has sometimes killed the wrongly accused, the falsely convicted, the poorly defended, the nameless and the voiceless who had no resources to fight back.

And once the rope tightens, there is no undoing it.

Beyond the failures of the system, beyond the possibility of executing the innocent, there is a deeper, more damning question: how can a justice system that makes killing an offence, kill in the name of that same justice?

How does the state claim the moral authority to punish killing – by killing? What message does it send when the very institution meant to uphold life and order becomes an executioner? If taking a life is the ultimate crime, how does the law excuse itself from committing that very act?

This is not justice. This is not deterrence. This is an institutionalised contradiction that we have allowed to persist, unquestioned, for too long.