Singapore executes man over a kilo of weed

Why? He was trafficking cannabis. How many cannabis overdoses occurred in the US last year? Maybe you’d like us to ban cigarettes and alcohol first?

Would they? There are places where drug deaths are close to nil and they don’t have to submit to a police state where people get executed over a drug that doesn’t even kill people. Guess what the drug policy looks like in those countries?

Here we go with the ignorant pro-death penalty mob. Even if you ignore all the other reasons the death penalty is a terrible idea (more expensive than life in prison, little evidence it deters crime, racial/economic biases in who receives it, irreversibility should further evidence arise, etc.) you have to be okay with the government having the authority to kill its citizens. Many death penalty supporters don’t even trust the government to put tax money to good use, to educate children, or to run elections. How many of you believe in a “deep state”? Think they should have the right to kill people? There’s a reason most first world countries have abolished killing their citizens. You might think that sitting at your computer and calling for the deaths of marijuana dealers makes you sound righteous and intelligent. Well, it doesn’t. You guys just sound like every other quick to judge, uneducated, moral-panicked, scary mob in history.

The death penalty for drug crimes is heavily criticized by rights groups and campaigners, as other nations recognize addiction as a mental health issue instead of punishing it.

Yep. Meanwhile in Los Angeles the Hollywood propaganda machine glorifies drug use and some large percentage of drivers are high… No worries though because the corrupt and unelected government socializes the cost by mandating that we buy both car and medical insurance.

Why isn’t Chicago such a safe city? Shouldn’t the gun control make it so peaceful then?

I don't have a particularly strong opinion about whether marijuana should be legal in the U.S., but I also agree with those who point out that Singapore's strict laws and penalties about a number of things, including drugs, seem to have social benefits that may strongly outweigh the social ills that other countries have invited through some combination of lax laws or lax (or uneven) enforcement of those laws. It seems a bit perverse for those countries to be criticizing Singapore for its drug laws, which I gather are pretty effective.

Regarding marijuana in particular and illegal drugs more generally, what I find really odd is that anyone in Singapore would risk a death penalty for trafficking in illegal drugs, assuming that they are actually aware of the law and the penalty. In this case, that made me wonder whether there were evidentiary or procedural deficiencies leading to a possibly erroneous finding of guilt. In this respect, I found this set of quotations from Amnesty International rather disturbing:

“Tangaraju’s conviction relied mainly on statements from his police interrogation – taken without a lawyer and interpreter present – and the testimony of his two co-accused, one of which had his charges dismissed,” Amnesty International said.

“In countries that have not yet abolished this punishment, international safeguards require that the death penalty be imposed only when the guilt of the person charged is based upon clear and convincing evidenceleaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts – and after a legal process which gives all possible safeguards to ensure a fair trial,” Amnesty added.

Insofar as Amnesty International is commenting on the evidentiary burden in other countries that administer the death penalty, it is not a truthful statement of international law. In the U.S., the evidentiary standard in death penalty cases is, as in other criminal matters, proof of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt," which, under U.S. law, is a higher burden than proof by "clear and convincing evidence." U.S. law does not, however, require evidence "leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts." A jury in the U.S. is free to find proof beyond a reasonable doubt based on nothing more than its determination that one witness seems very credible, while another does not seem credible. Although procedural safeguards in the U.S. have tightened up in a number of ways over the years, it remains quite plausible that, in a number of states, the death penalty will be carried out against individuals who did not commit the crime for which they were found guilty and sentenced to death. In such cases, the purported "international safeguards" provide no protection at all for a death-row inmate.

You're apparently unfamiliar with the governing law in this area. Although Chicago (and other locales in Illinois) had some rather strict laws against the possession of handguns, a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), found that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment extended the Second Amendment rights found by the same five justices in Heller v. City of District of Columbia (2008) to apply equally to individual states and locales within those states. It was an outrageous example of the doctrine of "substantial due process" that Justice Scalia had repeatedly mocked throughout his career, and in his concurring opinion in McDonald, he had little more to say to defend the majority opinion except to assert rather meekly that the Court had applied the same stupid doctrine in a bunch of other areas.

I meant to say the doctrine of "substantive due process."

maybe I won't play basketball there...

So W Bush and Rush Limbaugh would have been executed for their drug convictions. Seems like the right thing to do.

Harsher drug penalties would save lives???? Maybe dig into the history of the U.S.’s “war on drugs” before solidifying your opinion.

Was it duty free then? You can’t get duty free when you enter from Malaysia, but the airport and boat terminals let you purchase when you’re coming in from other countries (most boats are with the neighboring Indonesian islands but I guess cruise ships would be similar). It’s the high (“sin”) tax that makes alcohol in Singapore so expensive, not due to vendor markup, I would always grab the max (one bottle of liquor and a bottle of wine/pack of beer) when I came in the country.

Wrong. Listen, while these so-called "sin taxes" are a pretty significant factor in the cost of alcohol in Singapore (beer tax at SGD 0.30 per percent of alcohol per liter, wine tax is SGD 20 per liter and the spirits tax is SGD 88 per liter). vendor markups also contribute to the final price that you're paying at the till.

OP doesn’t post a link to execution. Reported!

Bought it in the terminal, then brought it through customs back to the ship. No duty charged.

Bet they have some sort of socialized medical care too

Pics or shens