Create your future from your future, not your past – Werner Erhard

The family of death-row inmate Yong Vui Kong went on their knees this morning, in a vain bid to seek a face-to-face meeting with Singaporean President SR Nathan. Eleven family-members knelt in the compound of the Istana, after security personnel refused them entry to the building where the president’s office is located. If death penalty could completely banish people from drug trafficking, drug would have extinct long ago. Vui Kong still young, there are millions of things he could do to compensate the society. From his letters and behaviors in the prison, he is fully repented from what he has done back at his age of innocence.

“Vui Kong writes movingly about his mother in his clemency petition. She’s one of the reasons he cites for his decision to deliver those drugs. He says he wanted to help pay her medical bills. It’s easy to dismiss his assertion as a desperate attempt at justifying his actions. But then you meet her. You see what her illness has done. And you see flashes of the person that used to be, before life destroyed her spirit. And you understand how an illiterate 18-year-old kid could have gone down that path.”

There is something more ideal for Vui Kong to do, to speak for his deeds and times spent in the prison to the world than exterminate his life. Let him be the one who stands in front of the youth generation as a contrite paradigm to tell the world how destructive the consequence is to the life of a drug trafficker; let him relay his true account of his life, his peers who led him to suffering, and innocence kills.

“Vui Kong’s mother visited last year to Changi Prison, to see Vui Kong just two days before he was originally scheduled to hang. He had told her he was going away to seek penance for his sins and that he would never ever return.”

Dropped out of school at the age of 10, his highest education ever attained was standard four. Born into a broken family and forced to work at rubber estate, he is the casualty of another social issue that had gone untreated. Living with his beloved mother who is suffering from severe depression due to divorce and living as impoverished single mother, Vui Kong saw his mother pain and lacked a father figure in the household; he decided to give his mother a better living. However, he had made a mistake and trusted his peer while he was working as DVD seller in Kuala Lumpur.

Arrested in Singapore for trafficking 47 gram of Heroin into Singapore, he was barely 18 back then. Convicted drug trafficking under Singapore law , Vui Kong had been sentenced mandatory death penalty.

Doesn’t life deserve a second chance? Haven’t any of us not made any remorseful mistake once in our life? Help Vui Kong, advocate to abolish death penalty