Why Jabing Kho must rightly die

by Daniel Yap

JABING Kho is dead, like his victim Cao Ruiyin. He wanted to live, as his victim did, or at least we could surmise so from the way his legal team appealed the death sentence up to the very last moment.

The scales are now balanced. The scales are now balanced with blood for blood.

It has been a long time coming. The murder happened in 2008. The death sentence was passed in 2010. The appeal against the death sentence was rejected by the highest court in Singapore in 2011. When the law changed in 2013, he was snatched from the noose and given a shot at life imprisonment, but when his case was examined by the Court of Appeals again in 2015, his death sentence was upheld.

The subsequent appeals, all four of them, presented no new arguments. They were merely formalities, some even filed as civil motions so that they would have to be heard before being dismissed. His lawyers did everything in their power to extend his life.

It has been a long death. On May 20, 2016, Judge of Appeal Chao Hick Tin said that Kho’s lawyers “knew very well the execution was to have taken place last year” but had continued to file numerous unmerited last-minute legal applications. “The court should not be seen as a device to undermine the legal process. We cannot allow applications made at the eleventh hour, one after another. The legal system will fall into disrepute if we allow the system to be scuttled this way.”

In other words, it was time to die.

Jabing Kho hung between life and death for six years. Cao Ruiyin took six days to die as his brain bled from the 14 fractures inflicted by his killer. Both their fights are over now. They rest, against their wishes.

Whether you oppose his execution or not depends on your definition of justice. How you define justice depends on your view of the world. Is it just to demand that the punishment match the crime? Or is it always unjust when a life is taken?

Before we fall into matters of ideology, we need to remember what a criminal justice system is for.

Retribution – A punishment that fits the crime. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. The principle of “do unto others”. A balancing of the scales. Karma, if you will, or God’s vengeance.

Deterrence – Because people must know that crime must not go unpunished, and that crimes we as a society deem to be more undesirable should be matched with harsher punishment.

Incapacitation – Those who commit crimes must sometimes be prevented from having the opportunity to do so again. We keep them away from environments where they are prone to fall back into crime. We keep them away from those whom they would make their victims.

Rehabilitation – We punish criminals so that they learn not to commit crimes again. Some arguments exist about whether rehabilitation necessitates a return to society. Is it enough that a man repent? Or must he repent and also reintegrate into society?

It is not unusual to disagree about what is or isn’t just. Even within the judicial system, one judge will disagree with another as rulings are overturned on appeal.

How we find the appropriate middle ground between these four aspects of the criminal justice system depends largely on two levels.

The first is the laws of the land, which are set in place by Parliament – voted into existence by our Members of Parliament (MPs) (which is why MPs are so important – they should represent our ideal for the laws of this land). It is at this stage that the lines are drawn.

Second, judges, who interpret the laws of the land and administer justice with respect to all the considerations within the boundaries of the law that we have already set through our elected representatives.

We have put these structures in place so that society has an expected standard of behaviour. Within these structures, it was legal for Jabing Kho’s lawyers to use every trick they could think of to extend his life – by a year, by a month, by a day, by an hour. It was just for our judges to condemn him and bring his end swiftly.

Jabing Kho, an instrument of death, has, we hope, made his peace with death. As far as the laws of this land are concerned, it was right that Jabing Kho must die.

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Featured image A depiction of Lady Justice on the tympanum of the Old Supreme Court Building by wikipedia commons user Kok Leng Yeo. CC BY 2.0. 

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The post Why Jabing Kho must rightly die appeared first on The Middle Ground.

- Daniel Yap