On 19 February 2025, Singapore granted a last-minute reprieve to Pannir Selvam Pranthaman, who was scheduled for execution for drug trafficking on 20 February 2025. This case is not isolated— between October 2024 and February 2025, Singapore executed nine individuals, eight for drug trafficking offenses. These executions reveal a deliberate pattern: state violence operating not as mere administrative action, but as calculated political choice.
The state’s repeated, determined denial of human rights considerations in death penalty cases represents a conscious political decision to prioritise its sovereign authority to punish over international human rights norms and due process. Singapore’s death penalty regime exemplifies how states deliberately construct legitimacy for violence through legal structures while simultaneously claiming democratic authorisation through purported public support.
Singapore’s mandatory death penalty in drug cases, where judges have no discretion to consider individual circumstances, demonstrates how procedural frameworks can serve to insulate state violence from meaningful democratic deliberation. States thus presume moral authority through institutional status while failing to establish genuine democratic input, and by extension, the possibility of proportional justice is diminished.
The removal of judicial discretion creates an ‘accountability vacuum’— these mandatory sentencing provisions prevent judicial consideration of individual circumstances, while executive clemency remains extremely rare and opaque. Through these mechanisms, violence by the state becomes administrative routine rather than a subject of ethical and political consideration.
This transformation of violence into routine is further reinforced by claims of popular support. While Singapore claims broad public consent for capital punishment, this consent emerges within systems of coercion that fundamentally reconstruct political subjectivity.
The state’s monopoly over public discourse about the death penalty, coupled with restrictions on civil society advocacy, creates a structural bias that privileges certain forms of political expression while marginalising others. This manufactured consent operates not just through direct suppression of dissent, but through the systematic narrowing of political imagination.
Media narratives consistently frame executions as necessary crime control measures, reinforcing state-centric views of justice. Civil society organisations advocating for abolition face legal barriers and public stigmatisation. Within such constrained discourse, alternatives to state violence become literally unthinkable.
The legitimising framework for this violence rests primarily on deterrence claims, revealing a fundamental incongruity in the state’s position. Like other states that have practiced capital punishment, Singapore has not produced credible empirical evidence demonstrating that such punishment effectively deters drug trafficking. Instead, the state’s insistence on deterrence functions primarily as a rhetorical device to justify its monopoly on violence and exemplifies a broader pattern of how modern states legitimise violence through technocratic rationality.
Singapore’s framing of executions as necessary policy tools rather than political acts obscures their fundamentally violent nature. This technocratic veneer—where complex social issues are reduced to simplistic cause-and-effect relationships—serves to depoliticise state violence, presenting it as administrative necessity. The state’s persistent refusal to engage with empirical challenges to deterrence claims demonstrates how such “evidence-based” justifications function primarily as rhetorical shields for political violence rather than genuine policy considerations.
Even if we were to accept that Singapore’s population broadly supports capital punishment today, this consent reflects a temporal disconnect that undermines its moral authority. Current support exists within political circumstances shaped by decades of authoritarian governance and restrictions on civil society. Yet the violence justified through such consent creates long-term consequences that transcend the original conditions of authorisation.
The population that has consented is not the same population that will bear the long-term consequences of normalised state violence. As political attitudes evolve, the moral authority derived from past consent becomes increasingly hollow, revealing how even genuinely expressed consent at one moment may not adequately legitimise the ongoing use of violence as conditions change.
More fundamentally, the state’s deployment of violence re-engineers the possibilities for justice itself. While Singapore justifies executions through appeals to social order and deterrence, these acts of violence create a self-defeating cycle.
Executions reinforce the belief that only violence can address social problems, making non-violent alternatives seem increasingly unrealistic. The state’s violence eliminates our collective ability to imagine justice systems not built on killing. By repeatedly framing executions as necessary, Singapore neither promotes nor protects aspirations for justice; rather, the state damages our capacity to create genuine justice beyond state violence.
Pannir’s case ultimately demonstrates why neither institutional authority nor claimed popular consent can sufficiently legitimise state violence. Given the grave and inherently dangerous nature of state-sanctioned violence, the threshold for its legitimacy must be exceptionally high—and in the case of capital punishment, no threshold can ever be met.
Singapore’s death penalty regime shows how institutional mechanisms serve to insulate lethal force from genuine public oversight while manufacturing the appearance of consent. Only by interrogating these dynamics can we develop more nuanced frameworks for evaluating the legitimacy claims of state violence and imagine more just alternatives to punishment by death.
* Banner photo by matthew6910 on Unsplash
*The views expressed in the blog are those of the author alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
