Two Executions...Worlds Apart

By Sarah Birmingham

Ms. Birmingham is an occasional contributor to the FAIRBANK REPORT.

Ten days after Singapore hanged Nguyen Tuong Van, the state of California executed Stan “Tookie” Williams. Two state executions in two weeks but quite worlds apart.

The Substantive Law

Nguyen Van was convicted of drug smuggling by a judge. He was on his way home to Australia when he was caught with 400 grams of heroine strapped to his torso by officers at Singapore's Changi Airport.

Tookie Williams was convicted of four first-degree murders by a Los Angeles County jury. Williams killed a 7-11 store clerk and three members of the Yang family who ran a small motel in South Los Angeles.

The Procedural Law

Nguyen Van had one appeal to the Singapore Supreme Court and one executive appeal to the President of the Republic of Singapore for clemency.

The same jury that convicted Williams also meted out the death penalty against him. In addition, Williams had 25 years’ worth of appeals through: the California Appellate Court, the California State Supreme Court, the United States District Court, the United States Appellate Court and the United States Supreme Court. Because of the length of the appeals processes in the United States, which in Williams’s case was a quarter of a century, Williams’s case was actually heard by about a dozen different individual judges.

Williams also launched executive appeals for clemency with several sitting state governors, including the present governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, according to press accounts, agonized over the decision for several sleepless nights.

The Method of Execution

Nguyen Van was hanged on the gallows, which by most accounts is the cruelest form of execution. Williams’s execution was via lethal injection.

Reasonable people will disagree over the (in)justice of the death penalty. However, the differences as shown above in these two criminal cases are quite startling.

That’s why reasonable people the world over have expressed outrage against the inherent injustice in the Nguyen Van case.