Twice now in the past month, citizens have been given the death penalty, once in Nigeria and the other in Singapore. There has been a significant advancement in the Criminal Justice System that might result in a great shift that would be extremely beneficial to countries especially since normalcy is unlikely to return anytime soon in the face of the continued number of new cases of COVID-19.
In Singapore, a Malaysian man “Punithan Genasan”, aged 37, was found complicit in heroin trafficking back in 2011 and was sentenced to death remotely with this being the first case of the death penalty being handed out remotely in Singapore. Punithan claims that he was not guilty of the crimes and is expected to appeal against the ruling.
A similar ruling was also made in Nigeria, where Lagos judge Mojisola Dada sentenced Olalekan Hameed to death by hanging for the murder of his employer's mother. The Nigerian driver had pleaded not guilty back in December 2018 and awaited the hearing at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison. The same was provided after a virtual hearing that lasted 3 hours. Human Rights Watch has raised several petitions to prevent the death penalty from being handed out and it seems to have gained some amount of traction amongst the more liberal members of the population.
The formation of these virtual courts shows a desire by the host nations to increase accessibility to justice and a continued focus on the upkeep of the Rule of Law and many nations around the world would be well pressed to follow through in their examples. The Human Rights Watch(An International Non-Governmental Organisation), however, had a different conception of what this constituted. While they lauded the increased accessibility, they declaim the death penalty as harsh and abhorrent in the modern age. An official spokesperson stated that "The irreversible punishment is archaic, inherently cruel and inhuman, it should be abolished".
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