release

For crimes of unusual savagery, where rehabilitation is unlikely, where the criminal poses a direct and imminent danger to the public should he escape or be released, and where guilt is shown by virtually certain objective evidence, I think the death penalty is an appropriate tool of our criminal justice system. For criminals like Joseph Smith, the end cannot come too swiftly.

Carlie, a sixth-grader, was kidnapped from a carwash parking lot on Feb. 1, 2004, as she walked home after visiting a friend. Several days later, her half-naked body was found in the underbrush near a church. She had been raped and strangled - a grisly discovery that alarmed Sarasota.

Smith’s crime was captured on video camera. He was positively identified by his brother, and a distinctive tattoo on his arm left little doubt as to the criminal’s identity. While in prison, Smith confessed to his mother that he was on illegal drugs at the time. Even Smith’s lawyer seemed overwhelmed by the evidence, when he chose not to give a closing argument in a possible move to protect his credibility for the penalty phase.

For Smith, death may be too kind. Van Nguyen is a different story altogether.

It was the final farewell to mother Kim and twin brother, Khoa, that was to dominate the last of his daylight hours yesterday. A veiled Mrs Nguyen arrived just after 12.30pm for her scheduled visit. Wiping tears from her face, she slowly entered the visitors’ centre, where Khoa was waiting for her. They emerged together six hours later, after a rare expression of compassion from the Singapore Government. Prompted by a personal plea from John Howard to his Singaporean counterpart, Lee Hsien Loong, authorities lifted a ban on the pair holding hands with the condemned 25-year-old. Leaving the jail, Mrs Nguyen was so distressed she was barely able to walk.

Unlike any other death penalty case I have read about, this one really moved and disturbed me. The vivid picture of his mother’s grief, combined with my gut feeling that the punishment far outweighs the crime, leave me convinced that Australia should try harder to extricate its citizen from Singapore’s lethal clutches. Yes, Van Nguyen carried almost a pound of heroin through Singapore, on his way to Australia, and he should recieve a stiff punishment for that. But Nguyen’s biggest crime seems to be stupidity - allowing himself to be used by a drug-smuggling ring that he apparently had no other part in, and failing to anticipate that he might be get caught in Singapore on his route from Cambodia to Australia.

Surely ten years in a foreign jail would deter him from repeating his crime. Surely the prospect of a stiffer sentence would encourage him to cooperate with authorities to nail the ringleaders. Surely, there must be another way to handle this. Singapore has chosen to take a hard-line stance on drug-smuggling, as they have the right to do. But executing 25 year olds at the lowest level of the enterprise only creates job openings for naive, easily manipulated young travelers. It does nothing to deter the high-level operators who somehow escape this rough justice. In the case of Van Nguyen, death is the wrong answer.