The biggest mistake Singapore has made is to delay the execution so prolonging the matter and giving the hounds too long to bay.
If one does not want to die for smuggling drugs in Asia one doesn't smuggle drugs.
The Asians courts are not weak like ours, they mean exactly what they say and everyone knows about it.
I wish our law courts were as severe as they are, I wish every drug dealer,every trafficker , every smuggler would be hanged by the neck until they were dead.
Then the misery and despair that many Australian families of drug addicts suffer would disappear.

Listen,

those comments by mick etc were the worst i have seen.

Its about choices. Yes, van chose to do that. But it is Australians, those you just mentioned that chose to do the drugs in the first place.

You tell me where you have heard heroin mentioned in a positive light? Nowhere, yet our people tend to keep sticking needles in their arms because Daddy did not like them or something like that. Pathetic. If there were no market, there would be no mr Nguyen to talk about.

Be empathetic at least and see that we have differing views. Australians as a whole do not want our kids to be hung for 400g or Herion, we want to see them become decent human beings, our culture is not cut and dry like Asia is, life is more valued.

Hang him hey. I wish you could watch. You are wishing for someone to be murdered. I wont have any trouble at the pearly gates, but plenty will.

Gillian Handley has made two incorrect assumptions. The first is that the death penalty is ineffective. But when Barlow and Chambers were hung thirty years ago, the newspapers that I read at the time claimed that there had been a noticeable drop in heroin importations into Australia. When two home invaders were shot dead in South West Queensland in two separate incidents, several years ago, burglaries in the Gold Coast / Brisbane areas dropped almost to zero for months after the shootings.

Her second assumption is that criminals are just ordinary guys who do stupid things, and that they are capable of remorse. The vast majority of very serious crime is committed by repeat offenders who have personalities where emotions like empathy, compassion and remorse do not even register.

Repeat offenders, who usually have Anti Social Personality Disorder (ASPD) are very different from everybody else. The extreme form of ASPD is psychopathy, and psychopaths are so emotionally dead that they can even fool lie detectors. Lie detectors work by measuring physical responses to emotional stress. The only problem with psychopaths, is that they have no emotional feelings at all, and so they can not physically respond to emotional prompts. Men like Ivan Milat can carve up a screaming woman like they are slicing up a loaf of bread.

Both psychopathy and ASPD appear to be genetically inherited and so it is no surprise that these twins are both criminal. Where one twin is criminal, then the second twin (if raised in a separate household) will become criminal at a rate that is statistically significant. (Twins Reared Apart Studies)

The best thing that any society can do with professional criminals like Nguyen, who recognize no constraints upon their unacceptable behaviour, is to simply to get rid of them. Permanently.

Thank you for your article Gillian, though I do find it quite naive.

I do not believe in capital punishment under any circumstances.

Do you really think that this was his first offence? He must have done an incredible lot of homework and footwork to become a drug mule for that amount of heroin. He must have had a lot of underworld contacts. Such contacts do not arrive on one's doorstep overnight.

The other story he spins is that his brother has a gambling addiction. Nothing rings true for me - except poor Mum's despair. So what if he and his twin brother were bashed by their stepfather as kids? Very sad, but irrevelant in the context of what he had planned and was engaging in - 22,000 hits of heroin to potentially kill hundreds of young Aussies.

Yes, I would like him transported here to one of our prisons - never to be released! He should be stripped of all human rights in a civilised society - apart from the basics of food, water, shelter (which many of our heroin addicted street kids do not have).

Psychopaths do not show remorse Gillian. How can they? They do not have a superego. If people do not have a superego they do not feel guilt. They do not feel remorse. So, they just go out and repeat the same behaviours. Good examples are paedophiles and repeated rapists.

Ng suggests in his account to the court that he is quite a bright young fellow. He could easily have found legal ways in this country to assist his "addicted" twin brother. If people in Aussie society are genuine, it is not that difficult to get help. He could have used his deceitful neurones and his boundless underworld energy to get heaps of help in this country. It seems that he did not choose to do this.

He chose to become involved in the illegalities of another country well known for barbaric laws.

I feel sorry for the Mums, Dads, Brothers, Sisters etc whose family members are dead because of drug parasites.

Cheers
Kay

Thanks to Gillian Handley for her article. Living in Europe, I cannot give any comment to Australian aspects of her deliberations. But the simple truth is not to kill a human being. The death penalty only shows one effect: to threaten with the act of murder to persuade men that brute force is the medium to get others to agree.
By the way: death can never be a "penalty" or "punishment", for all of us have to die. The captal punishment consists of the terror to expect the death.
So, death penalty consist of judicial terrorism. Terrorism initiated by "The State".

Imprisonment in a Singaporean or Malaysian jail certainly is the worst punishment one has to go through, and the practice of Caning - ordered by "law", is the utmost disgusting judicial practice ... it shows the dark and poor character of the Singaporean and Malaysian law, which will never solve the abuse of drugs, which is criminal and we have to fight against.

Morpho

Nguyen's life should be spared because he was clearly a very naive (and desperate) young man who either completely failed to consider the very serious consequences of trafficking narcotics across Asia or was unaware, oblivious to the facts. Ignorant too of the nature of the dangerous goods he was carrying and the damage and misery they would later inflict. He's clearly not of the same ilk as the evil, calculating drug syndicates / dealers who peddle death on the streets for their own selfish gain.
Just a thought - I'm no lawyer but from what I can see, Nguyen didn't actually officially enter Singapore. Surely the transit lounge of any international airport is in essence 'no man's land?', similar to being in 'International waters'. As he was about to board the plane back to Melbourne, did he have a Singapore entry stamp in his pasport - answer? no!
I think this should have been taken into consideration during his trial.