The spirit of the law
SINGAPORE'S laws against drug smuggling are rightly stern, although the death penalty imposed for the possession of a set weight of drugs, as this implies an intention to sell them, is a distasteful and excessive punishment. Those who peddle drugs or act as couriers should expect to be dealt with harshly. They knowingly destroy the lives of others, always for money, and sometimes to feed a life-threatening drug habit of their own. Life imprisonment is not too harsh a punishment for such callousness.
At this moment, however, a young Hong Kong woman is facing not a life sentence but one of death by hanging. At the time of her arrest she was 19 years old. Her friend, who was then under 18, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the same crime. The difference between them was no more than an arbitrarily fixed age of greater criminal responsibility.
If there is to be differential sentencing to take account of relative youth and immaturity, a line has to be drawn somewhere. But once it has been recognised that youth is a mitigating factor, it is not unreasonable to argue that individuals mature at different speeds. Was Poon Yuen-chung any more responsible for her own actions at 19 than her accomplice Lam Hoi-ka at 17? The Singaporean judicial system wisely recognises that not all criminals are irretrievably corrupted. It provides the option of appealing for clemency to the President and asks him to exercise his judgment with greater sensitivity than the unavoidably inflexible provisions of black-letter law permit in the courts. It would be an act of enlightenment as well as generosity if President Ong Teng Cheong were to commute Poon Yuen-chung's sentence to life imprisonment. He would be acting within the spirit of the law's recognition that youth and immaturity are factors relevant to the punishment imposed.
The death penalty is, in truth, not to be justified, whatever the crime. It is not even effective, on its own, as a deterrent. The main deterrent to crime lies in the risk of being caught. However, for as long as the penalty remains on the statute books in Singapore and other nations round the region, it is better to err on the side of leniency in the face of the criminal's youth, than to take a young life by the brutal method of hanging.