Has ST and the Law Ministry hammered the final nail into his coffin?

On the printed version of Straits Times of July 10 2010, I read "Law Ministry rebuts lawyer's claim."

"The government is entitled to comment on such policies... Mr Ravi's proposition that the clemency process has been flawed, either by what the minister has said, or by reason of the Attorney-General advising the government, is also incorrect"- The Law Ministry on lawyer M. Ravi's allegations that Minister K. Shanmugum's comments at the community dialogue on May 9 had prejudiced Yong's case.

It went on to point out "that evidence in the court showed that Yong had traffic heroin on other occasions before he was arrested in June 2007."

ST also reported K. Shanmugum's comment at the May 9 dialogue, "Yong Vui Kong is young. But if we say 'We let you go', what is the signal we are sending?" Are we to understand that what the law minister said was not 'sub judice' but an 'entitlement' to comment on a case that was ongoing and yet to be determined by the appeal judges?

I also read a review/highlight of Alan Shadrake's book "Once A Jolly Hangman" by Yawning Bread, "Julia Bohl (Chapter 10) had been closely watched by the Central Narcotics Bureau for several months as a supplier of various party drugs to high society. Piecing together various reports, Shadrake shows that an undercover officer was planted in her company, eventually gaining her confidence. In a raid mounted on a party one night in March 2002, Bohl and several others were arrested, with Bohl charged for having 687 grams of cannabis in her possession, above the 500-gram threshold that mandates the death penalty. The German government applied maximum pressure on Singapore, threatening economic reprisals. The seized drugs (all or part of it?) were then re-analysed by a laboratory which issued a new report that said there were just 281 grams. She was sentenced to five years in jail, serving only three". [Link]

Signals signifying justice? I'm confused.

Is it only in Singapore that "the government is entitled to" lots more than one can imagine?

Someone commented on my previous blog [Link]: "With power you can invoke justice. With money you can pervert justice." After reading this and the review/highlight of Alan Shadrake's book "Once A Jolly Hangman" by Yawning Bread [Link], I totally agree.

The FIFA World Cup will be over by early Monday morning. After this article by ST, will it be 'game over' for Vui Kong?








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