The Death Penalty and the “14.99g” Charge

While I was searching Lawnet for death penalty cases last December (preliminary statistics here), I also happened upon certain cases involving (to put it mildly) an interesting use of the Public Prosecutor’s discretion as regards the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Before this, I’d only known through hearsay that the prosecution occasionally presses a non-capital charge against a drug trafficker even though the actual quantity involved would have attracted the mandatory death penalty. (Alex Au mentions this practice in his article, in the second blurb in the right column.) So, even if the accused was found with 30g of heroin, he is charged with trafficking “not less than 14.99g”.

Of course, the prosecutorial discretion may be exercised in other ways to avoid the mandatory death penalty. For example, by pressing a charge of possession instead. Indeed, that’s been done sometimes. But this may potentially result in a manifestly inadequate penalty — even though the maximum sentence of 10 years’ jail for possession of a controlled drug is itself nothing to scoff at.

The McDonald’s Doraemon Pig Toy Controversy

A word on this McDonald’s Doraemon toy controversy, which coincidentally comes at a time when the Christians’ use of the word ‘Allah’ is still a raging issue in Malaysia:

ST Singapore

Jan 9, 2010

McDonald’s pulls pig toy

Its move in omitting pig character from zodiac animal set irks Chinese

By Leow Si Wan & Chuang Bing Han

FAST-FOOD giant McDonald’s has stirred up a controversy by omitting pig characters from its latest toy promotions.

The pig soft toy was expected to have been part of a 12-character Doraemon set depicting the animals of the Chinese zodiac calendar. Customers wanting the toy would have to pay $2 on top of making a food purchase.

But McDonald’s decided not to include the pig toy to avoid offending Muslim customers, and had a Doraemon Cupid toy in its place instead.

The move has upset Chinese customers keen on collecting all 12 toys in the series.

Of Choice and Culture-Specific Pay-Offs

McDonald’s is, of course, being rather silly. The key point is that none of the Doraemon toys are included free with a McDonald’s meal; you’d need to fork out an additional $2 to get the toy. So customers get to choose whether they want to purchase a Doraemon-pig chimera toy to go along with their empty calories.

16-Year-Olds, Debit Cards and Clueless Parents

Another example of the silly overprotectiveness of Singaporean parents:

Debit cards for 16-year-olds?

I WAS surprised earlier this month to find that POSB had ’sold’ a debit card to my 16-year-old son. My wife and I would have given him a debit or credit card ourselves, but only when the time was right. I did not know banks sold such cards to 16-year-olds. Isn’t there a minimum age criterion for such products? Who sets it – the banks or the Monetary Authority of Singapore?

I do not think many 16-year-olds have any money of their own, so one way of looking at this is the bank is making it easier for youngsters to spend their parents’ money. We have seen how many adults cannot exercise prudence with their credit cards, so why should the banks expect youngsters to do so with their debit cards?

Samuel Owen

And ST Forum today published another letter along the same lines.

Capital Punishment in Singapore: Preliminary Statistics

Over the December holidays, I was compiling data on capital punishment employed locally between 1998-2009 (a semi-arbitrary time period). That project is far from complete, because I’ll need to finish extracting important facts from each case, including the race/nationality of the accused, a summary of the offence etc. That’s projected to take at least another 30-40 hours. The flurry and business of the new semester means, however, that I’ll have to shelve the project for the time being.

But after some internal debate, I’ve decided to post (if only for personal recording purposes) the bare minimum of what I have thus far: a table showing the number of death sentences finally meted out by Singapore courts since 1998, and the class of offences each such sentence was based on.

The table:

Table 1: Number of Death Sentences Finally Meted Out by the Singapore Courts (1998-2009)

	Murder	Arms Offences	Drugs	Total
1998	11	0	23	34
1999	4	0	30	34
2000	6	0	17	23
2001	1	1	22	24
2002	6	0	16	22
2003	4	0	13	17
2004	2	1	5	8
2005	1	2	5	8
2006	5	0	2	7
2007	3	0	2	5
2008	5	1	5	11
2009	5	0	9	14

3 Perspectives on the Proposed Pre-Election ‘Cooling-Off’ Period

Much has been said in the blogosphere about the proposed 1-day pre-election ‘cooling-off’ period (e.g., link 1 / link 2). But I’ll give my own perspective anyway — or three perspectives, rather.

(1) Cooling Off — Without Having Broken a Sweat

One striking thing about a ‘cooling-off’ period is its pointlessness in Singapore’s context. Why the need to ‘cool off’, when there isn’t much of a ‘warm-up’ period to speak of? A minimum 9-day campaigning period between Nomination Day and Polling Day is ludicrously short. And past General Elections have, true to form, stuck closely to the absolute minimum prescribed by law, as the Elections Department’s record makes clear.

In this regard, Australia and Indonesia (two countries PM Lee mentions as already having ‘cooling-off’ periods) are false comparators. In Australia, the minimum period between Nomination and Polling is 23 days (Commonwealth Electoral Act, s. 157). Similarly, full-scale electoral campaigning for the 2009 Indonesian legislative elections lasted some 21 days.

Racism in “Daddy At Home” (Part II) — The Offending Segment

|  Part I |  Part II |

The Straits Times Forum today published a letter defending(!) Mediacorp in its tasteless use of a racist stereotype on its Channel 8 serial, “Daddy at Home”. But more on that later.

As I made clear, my previous post had been based entirely on Ms. Chow’s description in her letter to the ST Forum dated 14 November 2009. But I’ve since dug up the actual sequence itself from a clip which an evident local TV fan posted on Youtube. The video is here, and the specific part in question is from 2:50-4:10.

Freedom of Movement under the Singapore Constitution

Been pondering a little about the right to freedom of movement enshrined in Article 13(2) of the Singapore Constitution – especially in light of the passage in 2009 of the Public Order Act, and more recently, the Casino Control (Amendment) Act. Both these laws hamper, to varying degrees, the spatial mobility of Singaporeans within Singapore’s territory.