SAR death penalty is a border issue

AT the time - June 1966 - it was not much more than a page-filler report, squeezed between the latest news on newly independent Rhodesia and Dean Rusk praising Chiang Kai-shek and 'Free China'.

A watchman found lying in a pool of his own blood, two missing cash boxes containing $7,000, an arrest, within hours, of a suspect. Four months later on November 16, the suspect - 25-year-old Wong Kai-kei - was dead too, hanged by the neck in Stanley Prison. A pathetic crime, followed by swift judicial retribution made significant because it turned out to be the last execution to take place in Hong Kong.

Britain abolished the death penalty in 1965, but it remained on the statute books here until 1993 as a mandatory sentence for murder. However, each of the 263 death sentences passed down between 1966 and 1993 were commuted to life imprisonment by the governor, on the advice of the Executive Council. Judges handed down sentences they knew would never be carried out, and prisoners on death row knew they were more likely to die of old age than on the scaffold.

Given its historic significance, it is a pity - not just for the Wong family - that so little is known about Wong's last moments. We do not even know for sure who hanged him. In 1986 an undignified dispute broke out between two expatriates who both claimed to have been working as hangmen in Hong Kong prisons in the early 1960s. John Fleming, described as the owner of a car hire firm on Lantau, was interviewed by this newspaper and recounted some gory details about his former career as a hangman in Hong Kong prisons. These included his fee ('$75 a neck in those days'), his uniform (white vest, white shorts and plimsolls), and his moral qualms about his work: 'I won't lose any sleep over it, I never have, because I believe in capital punishment'.

British television journalist Alan Whicker picked up on the story a few years later and Mr Fleming appeared on British television in front of Stanley Prison reminiscing about the good old days. This infuriated one viewer, Richard Brimmicombe-Wood, crime prevention officer at a British holiday camp, who had worked in the Hong Kong prison service for 22 years, who said he had personally worked on 30 hangings between 1954 and 1966 and Mr Fleming had not been at any of them. The Correctional Services Department declined to settle the argument.

This spat made entertaining reading, but during the same period the death penalty became a hot issue again. One group howled for its reintroduction, in order to halt a growing crime rate. These included Legislative Councillors Selina Chow Liang Shuk-yee and Kingsley Sit Ho-yin, and according to opinion polls, 70 per cent of the general public. 'I am a Chinese at heart,' Mrs Chow told Legco in 1986. 'The law of the gods says those that kill should die.' Another group called for the law to be altered to be in line with current practice, and pressed for complete abolition before 1997.