In July 2013, then-US president Barack Obama sat down with his Vietnamese counterpart, Truong Tan Sang, to talk about Thomas Jefferson. It was Jefferson, Sang said, who had inspired the words of Ho Chi Minh's Proclamation of Independence, which carried as its opener a passage of America's Declaration of Independence. Just 2 weeks after this high-minded discussion on autonomy and liberty, Vietnam executed a young man named Nguyen Anh Tuan. It was thought to have been one of the first executions in Vietnam since it changed to death by lethal injection years earlier. But because Vietnam was banned from purchasing "authorized" lethal drugs, Tuan was administered with a home-made concoction that reportedly took 2 hours to kill him. Between the month of Tuan's death, August 2011, and June 2016, Vietnam executed 439 people, according to one estimate by its Ministry of Public Security, which normally doesn't publish such lists. In early 2013, one co...
Striving for a World without Capital Punishment