Hang down your head, Tom Dooley...

Okay, a link in some questionable taste since it involves and Asian-Australian who if facing being hung by the shiny little techno-dictatorship of Singapore. There hasn't been much coverage of this case in the British press - I only found out about it via my mate Adrock's delightfully outspoken blog. According to Amnesty the Singapore dictatorship has executed more than 400 people since 1991 (wow, it really must be a deterrent, eh?); given they has a tiny population of only 4.2 million this puts them into the shameful position of the highest execution rate per head of population in the world. I'm not making any excuses for Nguyen - he tried to smuggle heroin after all - but execution is wrong and it rarely stops crime (or they wouldn't need to keep executing so many people, would they?); as long as there are folk in vulnerable or desperate position there will always be folks who attempt stupid acts like being a drugs mule. Meantime the scumbags who run the drugs businesses sit in their mansions, utterly untouched by law enforcement; what do they care? Plenty more desperate folk to act as mules for them, while they stay safely out of harm's way... Adrock, himself a Singaporean living in Australia, has an interesting post over on Outrageous, Beautiful Misfit (Parental Advisory Warning!).