Singapore Just Sentenced a Drug Trafficker to Death via Zoom | Hacker News Reader

Singapore Just Sentenced a Drug Trafficker to Death via Zoom

vice.com

26 pointsdoppp14 comments

I gotta be honest, delivering a sentence over Zoom isn’t an issue for me. Amnesty International is right (IMHO) in arguing that a death sentence for a drug offense is extreme, but let’s not pretend that the judge being in a different room somehow changes the nature of the sentence. It’s not like the judge put on a clown costume or told jokes during the sentencing.

Maybe there is an argument that a trial conducted remotely loses some human emotion and makes a court more likely to find someone guilty of a crime, but the act of delivering a sentence after all that could just as easily be done via a letter in the post.

I agree with you. However:

>Maybe there is an argument that a trial conducted remotely loses some human emotion

This argument not only exists, it is entirely why we face a jury of our peers in person. Otherwise, there would be no reason not to avoid the more obvious problem of negative bias by hiding the defendant entirely (justice is supposed to be blind, after all).

While that's similar, the distinction here is that conducting a trial over Zoom doesn't hide the defendant; you can still see them. Zoom is admittedly lower fidelity, but does it actually matter? Zoom certainly degrades the experience when timing matters, such as telling a joke. But with testimony and legal arguments, timing isn't as important (as long as people aren't talking over each other). Also, with Zoom you could dedicate an portion of your screen to watching the defendant; in person you would have to move your gaze around the room, with Zoom you could see a defendant react to a witness' testimony without looking away from either of them.

So the question remains whether the net effect of Zoom's differences changes the court in a positive or negative way. I don't think that you can say Zoom is bad just because hiding the defendant is bad.

I would think the closest analogy would be to the death penalty in the USA surrounding lethal injections.

Every company that is knowingly being used for the cocktail to kill someone has made the supply gone. They refuse to supply to any state that diverts to executions. Sure, the executions are 'legal' (removing jurors who are ethically against death penalty is a whole different issue).... But the companies manufacturing these chemicals don't want anything to do.

I wonder how Zoom is going to handle this in the future? Even though they obviously had 0 input for Singapore executing a citizen, the article makes it sound like Zoom was somehow, peripherally complicit with state sanctioned murder.

I am constantly in awe that we live in a society which has no clue what consciousness is or when it begins in a human and despite that we've made abortion legal while at the same time making getting high and putting what you want into your own body illegal to the point of executing offenders.

How (and why) is it that almost the entire world is dancing to the same tune with regards to the War on Drugs?

I'm convinced that the people who keep drugs illegal are profiting immensely from these policies. Otherwise, why wouldn't we arrest people only when they commit a victim-ful crime or potentially victim-ful crime, e.g. arresting people for drunk driving rather than just for drinking...

Other places maybe, but Singapore is one place where I think they do it out of conviction and aren’t doing it for some corrupt profit motive. They pay politicians (members of the cabinet) a good salary to make corruption less attractive.

Legalize drugs and let people do what they want and be responsible for their own actions.

-or-

Have a welfare state

Pick one.

You can't have a welfare state and at the same time let people do whatever they want with their bodies, because the cost will be borne by everyone.

That makes some sense, but I don't see why I have to pick one.

How do you feel about making it illegal to generate new humans (have babies) and do drugs if you're on welfare?

I don't see why it's logical that we can only enforce the law for everybody or nobody.

Anyway, whatever we have now is not working. Drugs are illegal but I can still get them.

>the cost will be borne by everyone

This is how a welfare state works in all scenarios. The question is not "is there a cost", but "how high is the cost". Your comment is written under the assumption that legalizing drugs would create a cost that is too high, but you don't actually say that or explain why you think that.

Yet in the netherlands this isn't a problem

In the UK

Cigarette and Alcohol are legal, and lead to lots of expense in both health and policing.

Rock climbing is also legal, and leads to health and mountain rescue costs.

Driving is legal, and leads to health and police costs - and often the health costs are lives taken from people who weren't driving in the first place

All three can lead to other costs of social security - crash a car, end up with the governemnt paying sick pay. Have drunk sex, end up with child benefits and education costs for 18 years, etc.

I would expect the financial costs of providing a welfare state to decrease if you offered drug addicts their choice of addiction treatment or free drugs. Right now addicts are pushed toward treatment even if they don't want it. Common street drugs are inexpensive to manufacture. Treatment services are subject to Baumol's cost disease. Treatments are also unlikely to permanently alter behaviors of people who are being pushed toward behavioral changes rather than spontaneously seeking to change.

The state could buy an addict a 40 year supply of opiates (wholesale) at the same cost as 3 months of outpatient rehab. Incarceration is even more expensive than outpatient treatment.

That is your choice of what the state's treatment ought to be. You see how drug dependence leads to dependence on the state? How the state becomes a drug dealer? And the family of that addict will still suffer. That requires yet more state support.

This ends up with a system where drug dependence is subsidized by the state and taxpayers. Things that are subsidized tend to increase.

But the mechanism by which the state will intervene may very well be different once the cost of that approach becomes known, and people who are working and paying taxes decide they want the mechanism to be different.

There are signs on the border with Malaysia that say drug smuggling is punishable by death with minimal prosecution.

-- Death by Zoom -- I can't think of a more inhumane and painful way to die.

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