Black Friday

Well it's been a busy day for state executioners around the world - 3 death penalties (that we know of - those North Korean & Chinese kids can be quite sneaky about who they knock off) have been carried out in Singapore, America & Saudi Arabia. Amongst the executed was one young Australian lad, Nguyen Tuong Van, who had been caught in Singapore on route back to Australia, with cocaine strapped to his chest. Apparently he was driven to take this one off smuggling gig in an effort to pay off a large debt his twin brother had incurred. Incredibly stupid and incredibly sad.

For what it's worth, I was quite pleased with the level of public support that was expressed for Van in Australia. There's a fine line I guess you've got to tread in this kind of situation, between respecting the sovereign laws of a country and how it chooses to administer justice, and the rights of your own citizens in the face of a punishment which goes so starkly against widely held standards of morality. In the end there was nothing the Australian Government could have responsibly done to prevent Singapore from carrying out the execution, but I do hope that each and every official and citizen of Singapore got our message: the death penalty is ethically wrong and will never be considered an acceptable sentence in this country.

As for the USA's 1000th execution... well one could say so much about the gross hypocrisy inherent in the continued existence of the death penalty in a country which has self-appointed itself moral crusader of the world. To tell you the truth though, the whole American government/legislative system makes me so sick, I'm not up to commenting about it rationally. Perhaps I shouldn't be so concerned they're killing themselves off at a rate of thousands now... (of course that's crap because it's generally the poor, marginalised & disadvantaged who pay for the immoral decisions of the ruling classes, but you get what I'm saying yeah)

Texas was not the state that carried out Friday's execution by lethal injection (that was North Carolina), nevertheless they do administer the death penalty and I found a link to their Department of Criminal Justice site where you can see a list of all executed prisoners and their last words. A morbid but interesting read.