The death penalty’s got nothing to do with soccer

I went and bought The New Paper today at the petrol sta­tion because I had already read the Straits Times this morn­ing. There were 64 pages in today’s edi­tion, 10 of which were soccer-related. The rest were ring-tone or cha­t­room ads. The 5 or so pages of news cov­ered some inter­na­tional events (Thai Death Trucks) and some local ones (Hougang house­wife finds 20 parangs out­side flat — woo hoo. wind­fall; He finds sex scenes in Jurong library video — score!).

Since peo­ple who buy and read the New Paper reg­u­larly almost always watch the Eng­lish Pre­mier League and already know what’s hap­pened the pre­vi­ous night in soc­cer, they must some­times read the news and find some things actu­ally news­wor­thy, even if the items are sen­sa­tion­alised to the point of being offen­sive. Actu­ally, no, I think they must keep read­ing because it’s been sen­sa­tion­alised to the point of being offen­sive. We all are quite like that some­times. Things can be so bad they become compelling.

So, if New Paper jour­nal­ists can dig up sto­ries like the Hougang House­wife (My word! What drama! Imag­ine what the parangs were stashed away for!), surely they would want to dig up some other obscure story, for to tit­il­late the masses.

My sug­ges­tion today for an obscure, but nonethe­less tit­il­lat­ing story, would be head­lined: Death penalty, a warden’s story

The war­den would then describe to the jour­nal­ist what he usu­ally sees at a prison exe­cu­tion by hanging:

When the trap springs the pris­oner dan­gles at the end of the rope. There are times when the neck has not been bro­ken and the pris­oner stran­gles to death. His eyes pop almost out of his head, his tongue swells and pro­trudes from his mouth, his neck may be bro­ken, and the rope many times takes large por­tions of skin and flesh from the side of the face that the noose is on. He uri­nates, he defe­cates, and drop­pings fall to the floor while wit­nesses look on… A prison guard stands at the feet of the hanged per­son and holds the body steady, because dur­ing the last few min­utes there is usu­ally con­sid­er­able strug­gling in an effort to breathe.*

Sen­sa­tional, no? Goes well with the Straits Times and other media out­lets car­ry­ing cam­paigns to make the pub­lic more under­stand­ing so for­mer pris­on­ers can be employed and be given a sec­ond chance, no? Even bet­ter if they get the New Paper’s artist to sketch pic­tures of the con­demned pris­oner shit­ting him­self, just as they sketched pic­tures of peo­ple suf­fo­cat­ing in the ‘Thai Death Trucks’ in today’s edition.

Get to it, you New Paper reporters! Sen­sa­tional scoop! State-sanctioned hor­ri­ble death!

*p87, The Jus­tice Game, Geof­frey Robert­son QC, 1999 Vin­tage Books

Photo by Brad Michael Moore