Clemency in Southeast Asian Death Penalty Cases

The five contemporary practitioners of the death penalty in Southeast Asia (Indonesia,Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam) have performed judicial executions ona regular basis between 1975 and 2013. Notwithstanding this similarity, the numberof death sentences passed by courts that were subsequently reduced to a term ofimprisonment through grants of clemency by the executive has varied remarkablybetween these jurisdictions. Some of these countries commuted the sentences of deathrow prisoners often (for example, the clemency ‘rate’ of 91-92 per cent witnessed inThailand), others rarely (a clemency ‘rate’ of around 1 per cent in Singapore), andsome at ‘medium’ rates. In this article, I employ the methodology of comparativecriminal justice to explore the discrepancies and similarities in capital clemency practicebetween these five Southeast Asian jurisdictions. In doing so, I seek to identify thestructural and cultural reasons why retentionist countries exercise clemency at vastlydifferent ‘rates’ in finalised capital cases.