Top image credit: Apprentice

The road was quiet, with only the odd car or bus passing by. The sun was rising, the sky lighting up slowly behind the drab, grey walls of Changi Prison Complex. We sat three in a row, too weary for conversation.

Somewhere behind those imposing walls across the street, a man had just been hanged. All this while, his relatives stood outside the prison, clutching the fence, crying softly as the minutes ticked closer and closer to six: the time executions are usually carried out on Fridays.

While it’s been over six years since I first got involved in the campaign to abolish the death penalty in Singapore, it’s never stopped feeling surreal.

From the trials, with the legal jargon and the huge stacks of references and submissions, to the clemency appeals handed in at the side gate of the Istana, and even the dreaded quiet nights waiting for the end at dawn, capital punishment involves a deliberate, purposeful process to kill a person.

It’s hard to explain my personal reaction to executions. One common assumption is that I’m grieving the death of criminals, that I believe these criminals to be saints. But the reality is a little different.

The fact is that I don’t know these people. I see them in courtrooms, or see photos of them from happier times. Once in a while, we receive messages from them via visiting family members, usually just thanking us for our help. I read about their cases in court documents, affidavits and legal submissions.

Some cases are more egregious than others. While one can argue that young, small-time drug mules deserve rehabilitation and mercy rather than a one-way trip to the execution chamber, murders are harder to defend because of the violence involved. It’s highly possible that some of the inmates whose cases I’ve come across aren’t nice people at all. There’s no way for me to know.

The people I do know are their families. The mothers, siblings and wives who have committed no crime, but have to struggle with all the trauma, stress and stigma. These are the people who love these inmates even when no one else will, even when the state has ruled that they no longer deserve to be alive. They are the ones who demonstrate, over and over again, that an individual is always more than the worst thing he or she has ever done.

Working with them has shown me that life will never be as neat as we want it to be. That there aren’t clear “good guys” or “bad guys,” and it should never be that easy for us to decide between life and death.

It is for these families who have kept the faith and hoped beyond all hope that I grieve when an execution takes place.

An inmate’s journey ends when the execution is carried out, but the family will continue to live with the sorrow. When Kho Jabing was hanged on 20 May 2016, I sobbed for his mother and his sister – people who had, over the months we worked together, become my friends. I cried for Jumai, who had been so brave and so strong, and how she would have to share her birthday with the memory of rushing from the courtroom to the prison to say her final farewell to her brother.