that which i cannot accept
grappling with the depravity of the death penalty.
I was going to finish writing something completely different today. I was going to write something self-deprecating and wryly funny and maybe a little bit witty, and it was going to leave me feeling satisfied and slightly intelligent after I hit ‘send’.
Instead I’m lying in bed typing this on my phone with my thumbs because I can’t summon enough motivation to sit up and use my laptop. There are perfectly okay leftovers in the fridge and it wouldn’t take much skill or effort to heat them up, but I’ve just eaten two-thirds of a bag of crisps (supposedly low fat, or was that low sodium?) for dinner because I simply cannot be bothered to do anything that would require more steps.
So I lie here and think and feel and try to put these elusive thoughts and big feelings into words that I know will still feel inadequate.
If I’d had a baby instead of joining the anti-death penalty movement when I did, my child would be in high school today, beginning to feel the looming weight of O Levels prep lower on to her shoulders. My child would be able to speak, to walk, to run, to dance, to do algebra and write essays during two-hour-long exams, because she would have had fifteen years of love and care and education and still a long, long life ahead.
I don’t have a child. I don’t regret it. But it stops me in my tracks when I think about how, in this period that could have been a whole other human’s bright, happy lifetime, I’ve witnessed so much cruelty, brutality, grief and trauma. Instead of a steadily building flame of anticipation for many more promising years, I’ve seen hope and life get snuffed out, again and again and again.
The death penalty is a darkness that warps everything around it. Faith is tested; the wheel of karma creaks and spins off its axis. Moments of joy fight for purchase against black cliffs of disappointment and despair. Morbid rituals end up providing temporary comfort because the situation is so overwhelmingly horrifying that people grasp at solace wherever they can get it. Small kindnesses fall short or, worse, turn out to be silks wrapped beguilingly over the machinery of death. People get trapped in impossible situations with impossible choices; both the rock and the hard place are wrapped in thorns.
Every time I think I’ve seen the bottom—that it can’t possibly get more cruel and more painful, that surely I’ve seen it all now—I discover new facets of awful to capital punishment and its implementation. Families speaking in hushed, worried tones, unable to bring themselves to tell mothers or children that their sons or fathers will probably never walk out of Changi Prison again. Relatives forced to make repeated journeys to Singapore that take a heavy toll financially, physically, emotionally. A man attending a court hearing in the morning and sent to his death in the afternoon. A family whose final visit could only be a video call. Family members who weren’t able to make it to Singapore in time. A sister losing her brother to the gallows on her birthday. A brother asked to cross the Causeway back into Singapore late at night only to be given a letter saying the execution was going ahead at dawn as planned. Prisoners left to wait on a Zoom call with the court for hours, late into the night, only for the judges to come back and tell the one scheduled to hang the next morning that there’ll be no stay of execution. Prisoners accused of “abusing court process”, when all they were doing was fighting to live, just like how any of us would fight to survive. Prisoners begging for more time—just a little more time—their pleas falling on deaf ears. Prisoners woken in their cells to be given execution notices they hadn’t expected. Prisoners and families kept on tenterhooks waiting for court rulings because our system would rather expedite hearings than delay a hanging. Prisoners so exhausted, so beaten down by their struggles, that the last bit of agency they had left to exercise was to go to the gallows with all the courage, grace and dignity they could muster. Execution notices issued during the pandemic. Execution notices issued, then suddenly halted, with no clear explanation for the trauma inflicted. Execution notices issued when the prisoners were still party to ongoing legal proceedings. Executions notices issued with shorter timeframes than before.
Directly or indirectly, I have witnessed our system do these things in all our names. I have witnessed these things… and more.
Every bone in my body, every single one of my senses, rebels against what I’ve seen the death penalty regime do to people. I see it happen, I hear what the families tell me, but I cannot comprehend, I cannot digest, I cannot accept.
I cannot accept the cruelty. I cannot accept the heartlessness. I cannot accept the deep, deep wrongness, and I cannot accept that there are people in this world who see this wrong as right.
The death penalty is discombobulating because it’s murder draped in respectability and righteousness. It’s murder draped in “care”—claims of care for society, performances of care for families.
What does it mean when the prison service offers a shocked family who’ve been handed an execution notice access to a counsellor? What does it mean for prison officers, whatever their individual intentions, to ask if a sister, mother, wife “needs anything”? They need you not to kill their loved one; can you do that for them? If not—if you insist on killing—then what the fuck is there left to talk about?
I cannot imagine any other scenario in which a murderer would ask a woman if she’d like them to call her a counsellor, even as they loop the noose around her husband’s neck.
Over and over and over again, my horror spills out of me as grief, and my grief kindles in my chest into rage. If this rage had been born as my child in the very beginning, she would now be old enough to run with steady, unflinching steps, leaving only flames in her wake.