Posted on 09/22/2020 5:20:12 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
At dawn this date in 1994, Dutch citizen Johannes van Damme was hanged at Singapore’s Changi Prison for drug trafficking.
The first westerner hanged under Singapore’s draconian anti-drug law, the engineer had been nabbed at the airport with 4.32 kilos of heroin.
Van Damme, 59 at his death, claimed ignorance of the illicit contents and his case drew appeals from the Dutch government — to no avail.
The city-state’s severe criminal code and comprehensively ordered society — “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” in cyberpunk author William Gibson’s formulation — is somewhat notorious at this point.
But while foreign migrants and guest workers had regularly faced the gallows for similar offenses, van Damme’s hanging marked a significant ramping-up of enforcement. According to Amnesty International, Singapore carried out 54 drug-related hangings in 1994 and another 52 in 1995, after an early-90’s pace of under ten per year. It’s maintained rates in the dozens of executions per annum since then, making it the heaviest per-capita user of the death penalty in the world....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Asia is a big place. Why not just pick someplace else to sell illegal narcotics?
Most of.the guys were just passing through Singapore.to Australia, Europe or N.. America
“4.32 kilos of heroin.”
Yikes. How do you hide that?
We should have the same laws in the U.S.
All elected Rats and most Republicans would object to the disruption of supply.
He explained that ONE generation earlier when Singapore became independent, one in ten of them was addicted to hard drugs. Now, one in ten of them is a millionaire. This because they had the will to end narcotics trafficking.
He asked me how the number of drug related killings and overdose deaths in a similar sized American city related to the modest number of hangings in Singapore for drug trafficking and I had to admit that it was some multiple over 10 to 1 as a price to pay for keeping Singapore mostly drug free.
Not very well, apparently.
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