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Unveiling Singapore’s Death Penalty Discourse: A Critical Analysis of Public Opinion and Deterrent Claims

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While Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) maintains a firm stance on the effectiveness of the death penalty in managing drug trafficking in Singapore, the article presents evidence suggesting that the methodologies and interpretations of these studies might not be as substantial as portrayed.

Idaho draws down the shades on capital punishment

Idaho
As far as the Idaho Department of Correction is concerned, there is nothing public about a public execution.

What it does not want you to learn about capital punishment, it will not disclose — unless, of course, someone such as University of Idaho law professor Aliza Cover insists.

Given how difficult it’s become for states to obtain the chemicals required to kill someone through lethal injection, Cover bored into Idaho’s system with a public records request. That’s a relevant question these days. As death penalty states turn to new protocols and drugs, witnesses have been reporting instances of executions requiring an unusually long period of time — in one case up to one hour and 40 minutes — as well as inmates displaying signs of pain.

So thanks to Cover, Idahoans are learning:

-- The department hides records. At first, it decided Cover was entitled to a manual detailing its policies and nothing more.

Even when she sued, the agency barely relented, releasing heavily redacted documents. To others, including reporter Chris McDaniel, the department professed the records in its possession did not exist.

-- Unable to procure drugs through pharmaceutical companies, states are turning to compound pharmacies — with uncertain standards of quality. Idaho was among the states that contacted an India-based middleman, identified as Chris Harris. That detail was among the information the state withheld from McDaniel.

-- The state maintains 3 sets of financial books about its executions.

The 1st set minimized expenses and was handed out in response to public records requests. The 2nd set, detailing more costs, was issued to “hopefully appease” someone persistent enough to insist on more information. “And the 3rd set, testified former correction department purchasing agent Joanne Sooter, “was the actual set of books that would actually represent the expenses.”

-- In the 2012 execution of Richard Leavitt as well as the Paul Ezra Rhoades execution that preceded it in 2011, administrators at the correction department spent $26,000 in cash on details “that were going to come up at night or on a weekend that were just unusual expenditures and difficult,” testified correction employee Theo Lowe.

Nor is the Cover public records request the 1st instance of Idaho pulling down the blinds around the death penalty.

Given its way, the Department of Correction would have sanitized what reporters saw during Leavitt’s execution. Decreed the state: All you needed to see was Leavitt already on a gurney, hear him make a last statement and watch a lethal dose of chemicals flow into his veins.

What it did not want viewed or reported was the invasive part of the execution: How would Leavitt arrive in the chamber? Would he be heavily sedated? Would he struggle? Would the execution team easily find a vein or not?

In other words, any trace of human suffering or error would be scrubbed from public exposure.

Only the intervention of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals preserved full access to the public’s proxies.

Some 20 states, including Washington, have banned capital punishment.

Fewer death sentences are being imposed and being carried out.

Americans are turning away from the death penalty because they see its flaws — questions of wrongful convictions, expense, fairness and whether the practice is both cruel and unusual.

Of course, if Idahoans have no way of knowing how their state conducts executions in their name, how are they supposed to judge? Leave the state of Idaho to its own devices and they never will.

Source: The Lewiston Tribune, Editorial, February 7, 2019


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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