A Sentence From the Dark Ages : Flogging is barbaric torture; Singapore’s president should grant Michael Fay clemency

Our unease over the flogging sentence meted out to an American youth in Singapore increases with news reports giving credence to his claim that he was coerced into confessing by threats of beating and prolonged interrogation in a refrigerated room. A ruling on the 18-year-old’s final appeal for clemency to President Ong Teng Cheong is due soon. We hope the president considers this claim, and the well-documented flaws in Singapore’s authoritarian system of criminal justice.

If turned down, Michael Peter Fay faces six strokes of a sodden rattan cane across his bare buttocks, delivered by a martial-arts expert. This bloody lashing tears away pieces of flesh, is excruciatingly painful and leaves permanent scars. It amounts to the kind of torture outlawed by United Nations treaties and officially renounced by nearly all civilized countries except Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Brunei, Malaysia and a few others. President Clinton has personally urged clemency.

Fay, with no prior criminal record, confessed to spray-painting cars and possessing stolen property. He was sentenced to four months in jail, a $2,000 fine and caning. Fay says he confessed after a Malaysian youth arrested with him emerged from interrogation bloodied and beaten. He also cited fear of prolonged questioning in a refrigerated “air con” room where police grill the prisoner clad only in his underwear.

Such claims might be dismissed as desperate excuses to avoid punishment. But they are given credence by the reports of political dissidents who have suffered through questioning and beatings in the air-con room.

The Singaporean ambassador, S. R. Nathan, writes: “Our laws protect the majority of law-abiding citizens. Criminals cannot escape justice on the excuse of ‘victimhood.’ ”

Many Americans have voiced admiration for Singapore’s no-nonsense approach. But Singapore has dispensed with jury trials, abridged the right to legal counsel and the right against self-incrimination and allows prolonged detention without trial or charges for suspected gangsters and drug traffickers. Presumably juries and defense lawyers are just superfluous niceties that get in the way of clean streets and law-abiding citizens.

Singapore has made much of the evenhandedness of its justice, that Fay was getting only what local criminals can expect. It is comforting to know that foreigners and Singaporeans alike have equal access to the air-con room and caning bench.

Is it not time for Singapore to examine its authoritarian and potentially unfair legal system to make it conform to modern standards--not of leniency, but due process? President Ong can take the first step by commuting the barbaric sentence of Michael Peter Fay.