Scathing attack on death penalty puts author in city state's sights

Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock by Alan Shadrake SIRD (Strategic Information and Research Development Centre)

By his own admission British writer Alan Shadrake takes a 'publish and be damned' attitude. When he wrote his new broadside against Singapore's justice system, he must have known that he was playing with fire - and so it proved.

On November 16, Singapore's justice system hit back. Shadrake was sentenced to six weeks' jail, fined S$20,000 (HK$120,000) and ordered to pay S$55,000 in costs to the Attorney General's Chambers after being found guilty of contempt of court over 11 passages in his expose, Once a Jolly Hangman.

Undaunted, Shadrake has decided to stay in Singapore while appealing against the sentence. What's more, he plans to sue the city state for malicious prosecution. However the case unravels, doubtless, the fallout will fuel sales of the book, which has ample inherent drama.

Once a Jolly Hangman takes its cue from a journalistic coup: Shadrake's 2005 scoop interview with veteran Singapore executioner Darshan Singh. The debate that the story, which ran in The Australian, sparked was especially heated for a topical reason: it preceded the execution of Van Tuong Nguyen, a 25-year-old Australian hanged by Singh in Singapore's Changi Prison in 2005 after Nguyen was convicted of ferrying heroin into the garden city.

Once a Jolly Hangman turns the spotlight on Nguyen and a swathe of other Darshan Singh scalps. The body count includes Filipino 'havoc maid' Flor Contemplacion, budding Nigerian soccer player Amara Tochi, Hong Kong-based single mother Angel Mou, Singaporean ex-jet ski champion Shanmugam Murugesu, and Singaporean hairdresser Yen May Woen. Singh hanged them all.