Singapore brutality shocks the US - a view from Arizona

The Arizona Daily Star opines that "the senselessness of the death penalty was never more apparent than in the hanging of an Australian in Singapore earlier this month.

Nguyen Tuong Van, 25, was executed for a drug trafficking conviction. He was caught with 14 ounces of heroin at a Singapore airport while on his way from Cambodia to Australia, according to BBC News.

The hanging had to jolt even the staunchest of America's death penalty supporters, because here, we normally execute people only when that person has committed a murder...

While we could condemn the idea that Singapore could execute someone for drug trafficking, the sentiment was overshadowed by the fact that Boyd was only one of three people executed in this country that week. That left little room to condemn the harshness of the penalty in another country when we executed three times as many people in the same week.

But there are signs that the American public may be growing wary of the death penalty. In fact, growing evidence supports the elimination of the death penalty in this country."