[skissane]

I disagree with what you say on the intellectual disability issue, but don't have the time or motivation right now to respond in detail. I did want to comment on one thing you said though:

> More surprisingly, (if Thomas is to be believed) the Prisons Board themselves had no objection to abolishing the death penalty!

That's actually not surprising at all. If you look at the experience in most European countries – and also Australia, Canada and New Zealand – often the prison bureaucracy was a strong proponent of abolition. The staff of prisons often find they dislike killing prisoners, it eats at their conscience, and even many who support the death penalty turn into opponents when it becomes their job to play part in implementing it. It is easy to support killing people when they are nameless abstractions such as "murderers" or "terrorists" or "drug traffickers", much harder when they are specific individuals with names and faces and personalities, whom you see and talk to every day. Even if the executives aren't seeing the condemned every day, the perspective of their indirect reports who do often trickles up to them (and some of them will have risen through the ranks from that position). To some extent, part of the reason why the US has kept the death penalty while the UK/Canada/Australia/NZ/Ireland/etc have abolished it, is that in the Commonwealth governments have historically tended to be much more responsive to the demands and wishes of bureaucratic elites than in the US, especially when those demands/wishes conflict with the majority of popular opinion.

The European and Commonwealth model of abolition has generally been that governments need to lead public opinion rather than waiting for it. The former Malaysian government was attempting the same approach, even if it didn't work out quite as well for them – maybe unsurprising given the significant political and cultural differences between Malaysia and those other countries in which it has been quite successful – but I'm not sure if they should be criticised for trying. (Maybe moving too fast on this issue hastened their demise, and they should have waited to act until their position was more secure; but maybe their demise was inevitable no matter what they did on this issue.) If the Singaporean government tried to lead public opinion toward abolition, it is possible they might have much more success than was had in Malaysia – but they do not appear to be interested in trying.