saving citizen nguyen

The lawyers fought for 19 months.
A key campaign to save Mr. Nguyen from the Singapore gallows.
Their call for leniency failed.
A Friday soon.
Unless you change your mind.
Australians will be hanged.
Steve Boucher
He watched them arrive.
Young and old
At Changi Prison in Singapore, he watched them leave at dawn on Friday.
He had become friends with them, gave them advice, and when they were taken out of the cell, he had said goodbye.
Melbourne-based Robin van now seems sure to track them in a few weeks.
Friday 25-year-
The old man lost his last legal opportunity to escape the gallows: to the President S. R. Nathan.
Even so, his legal team, Nguyen-in a T-
Shirt marked as \"cond 856\" for death penalty-
Trying to comfort those who brought him the news.
Now, in addition to the unprecedented changes made by the Singapore Cabinet, he will be the first Australian to stay in Singapore.
It took a long time for Australians to begin to notice the plight of Nguyen.
This is partly due to his Australian lawyer, taking into account the absolutism of the Singapore Legal System and the well-known sensitivity of the thin
The government of the skin has customized a deliberate low-key legal response
A key designed to avoid intimidation or embarrassment.
Until this week, his upset mother publicly pleaded with the Australian government not to give up the struggle to save her son\'s life, and many were fully aware of the plight of Nguyen.
In the nearly three years since the arrest of young people, politicians and churches have been lobbying urgently, which is largely out of the public eye.
His friends and family have been praying and visiting.
An anonymous civil servant in Sydney sent money to Nguyen\'s mother to help fund visits to her son, which was moving.
But the job of saving his life falls on his legal team.
Melbourne lawyer Julian McMahon first heard about Nguyen three days after his arrest, when a Vietnamese woman dragged his lawyer\'s robes as he left court.
\"Can you look at his son\'s troubled friend in Singapore?
She asked politely.
The next day, a distraught mother sat in a room on Bourke Street in McMahon, and when a translator cried, she tells how Australian Federal Police first learned about her son\'s plight when they raided her home after her son was arrested.
Kim nguyen tells a familiar and difficult story of refugees, fleeing Vietnam, giving birth to twin boys in Thai camps, and then working hard to raise their children in Melbourne.
She made a sewing machine at night and packed ice cubes.
She sold her property to survive.
Nguyen has a \"normal\" childhood of elementary school, Boy Scouts and many friendships until the age of 12
When he attended the farewell dinner
Prior to high business research and failed website business.
But on his first overseas trip, he ruined this hopeful life.
On December 12, 2002, 22-year-old Nguyen was arrested during a routine inspection at Singapore Changi International Airport. He took a flight from Qantas to Melbourne and carried nearly 400 grams of heroin.
A parcel was found in his luggage, while his back was tied for a second.
Under Singapore law, anyone with 15 grams or more of heroin must be hanged.
Australian citizens returned to Sydney with heroin from Cambodia to a syndicate.
He will deliver drugs in exchange for money to pay his twin brothers up to $20,000 in legal debt.
Nguyen fell asleep in the transfer lounge and woke up 10 minutes before the plane took off.
He ran to C22 and put his backpack and Business Bag on X-ray machine.
Nguyen told the Singapore police after his arrest: \"Then I went through the metal detector and It muttered when I was worn out.
At that time, I knew I would be caught.
A policewoman searched him and found him with heroin on his back.
Nguyen was brought into the search room where he held up his shirt and handed the package to a male police officer.
\"It\'s heroin, sir . \" He said on his own initiative.
Then he tried to hit his head against the wall.
For the next 16 months, Nguyen spent the rest of Singapore\'s Queenstown Remand Prison.
He was found guilty in the high court on March 2004 and sentenced to hanging.
He was immediately taken to death row at Changi Prison.
Seven months later, his appeal failed.
His last hope was kindness.
He\'s probably only been alive for four weeks now.
Julian McMahon\'s first move was to send emergency letters to the minister of government, departments and police asking them to help the young man, and asked to provide police in Singapore with any information that could lead to the execution of an Australian citizen.
After studying the Drug Abuse Act in Singapore, he and lawyer Theo Magazis realized the need for expertise in QC.
They reached out to the former royal commissioner and the famous human rights lawyer Lex Rusley, who became the leader of the Melbourne legal team.
To appreciate the most important things of Singaporeans, McMahon visited the island and studied its heritage.
\"I read as much as possible about the history written by the people of Singapore,\" McMahon said . \".
\"It is important to understand their culture and how they view Nguyen\'s case and why and the case that likes it.
McMahon and Larsen also studied the remarks made by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
In particular, last year\'s National Day Rally address, which they cited in the leniency document.
It is striking that Australia does not have the same public campaign against the death penalty as it did before Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers of Australia were hanged in Malaysia for drug trafficking in 1986.
Former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke angered Malaysia\'s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, by describing the execution as \"brutal.
\"We are trying to treat this with respect without using any media stunts to create undue stress,\" McMahon said . \".
\"We urge people not to engage openly.
\"The defense case tried by the High Court stated that Nguyen was denied the legal right to arrest, that drugs were improperly handled by the police and that the death penalty violated the Singapore Constitution --
And international law
Implementation of the mandatory punishment of \"cruel and inhuman.
At all times, the team works hard to be polite and respectful.
\"We saw early on that if you were yelling at Singaporeans, it would only make your job more difficult,\" rusry said.
In any case, there is nothing to shout at, because there is no point in making huge criticisms of them according to our own principles.
You have to deal with them on their turf.
He acknowledged that Singapore had different views on the mandatory nature of the death penalty.
According to the mandatory death penalty, more than 400 people were executed in Singapore.
Local people, women, Western people and foreign workers
Between 1991 and 2003.
All of this was condemned by the judges who studied in English law, but they were bound by Parliament, without any discretion, to enforce what Amnesty International said --
Sponsorship killing
The mandatory death penalty prevents the defense from providing the client with personal circumstances to allow the judge to consider imposing a lighter sentence to mitigate the crime.
According to his lawyer, this does not mean that Nguyen has not offended him before, has shown remorse and has been \"flat \".
Nguyen also had no intention of leaving Singapore airport.
Unlike neighbouring Malaysia, Singapore has no distinction between transit and sovereign territory.
Murder, treason, kidnapping and a number of gun crimes are subject to death in Singapore.
\"If you don\'t punish them, they will try to ship drugs to Singapore, and more people will be punished by their actions,\" former prime minister Wu Zuodong once said of human traffickers \".
Although the Australian government has paid tickets and accommodation fees for lawyers to travel to Singapore many times, they have been working for nearly three years free of charge.
They looked at the issue of the death penalty and complex international jurisprudence and then lobbied Australian politicians for broad bipartisan support for Nguyen.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer was the first to urge the Singapore government not to hang Nguyen.
Since then, Prime Minister John Howard and shadow foreign minister Kevin Rudd have been part of a number of ministers, shadow ministers and local members to increase their voices.
All members of the Labor Party in the federal parliament called for leniency.
No one has ever protested Nguyen\'s innocence.
Despite his youth, stupidity and immaturity, there is no denying that he is a paid courier who travels to Australia with disruptive drugs.
His supporters admit he should be severely punished.
Life imprisonment and floggingbut not death.
Great efforts have been made to resolve this case
Trial, allowing Nguyen to face the lesser charge of not having the death penalty and to plead guilty.
He offered 30.
Annual sentence.
He also provided valuable help to AFP on drug cartels, although he was concerned that doing so would endanger his family.
Ramanathan Palakrishnan, a well-known defense lawyer in Singapore, was told to appear in court.
Palakrishnan is a highly respected witty, smoking legend in Singapore who has handled many death penalty cases.
In Queenstown Remand Prison, Mr. Nguyen asked Palakrishnan when he left Singapore.
\"I will die before you leave here,\" he was told . \".
Soon after, the week before the trial began on June 2003, Palakrishnan died of heart disease in Melbourne while visiting his son and Nguyen\'s legal team.
At the trial, the prosecution held that the Singapore government \"does not need to be reminded to respect and uphold\" human rights.
It also rejected criticism of the death penalty, which reflected Singapore\'s serious attitude towards drug crimes, \"barely divided or proportionate \".
For a long time, Kim nguyen prayed at the Buddhist shrine at home and blessed her son and the legal team.
On last March, the apparently emotional judge of Kan court rejected the verdict, found Nguyen guilty and sentenced him to death.
The Australian Parliament Amnesty Group said the verdict was \"very harsh \".
Lasry, unusually violating team discipline on the radio, angrily condemned the fact that it was \"weird\" that there was no room to reduce the sentence.
Once a request for pardon has been made, many senior Australian politicians have privately appealed to Singaporeans to pardon Nguyen.
The historical, economic and private relations between the two countries have been highly valued.
Then, on June, at the height of the daily television hysteria of the nine drug cases in Schapelle Corby and Bali, McMahon and Lasry met in Canberra with the High Commissioner of Singapore, Joseph R ·
Rasri said it was acceptable and polite for Koh to accept a copy of the leniency document, but he was just a messenger to the superior.
The last prisoner pardoned by Singapore\'s president was a female drug mule 13 years ago \".
Her sentence was reduced to life imprisonment and released weeks before she died of cancer.
Friends and family at Nguyen said they noticed a change in the rude young man they met in 2002.
He was more considerate, they said.
He was baptized in prison and is now making friends and comforting with other condemned people most of the time.
He even joked with a lawyer.
Rasri and McMahon took a while to understand that changing hair styles every time they visit Nguyen was for their benefit.
But the time to laugh never lasts.
Last week, just hours before a member of the Australian High Council told him that his pardon application failed, a close friend of the death row was hanged.
\"Every minute he is conscious, he has to think about the possibility that he will be killed,\" rasri said . \".
McMahon said Nguyen supported prisoners on other death row, who, like him, waited for appeals and petitions, \"then they were taken away and hanged and the next group joined in as well\"
McMahon added: \"He has become a lovely, sensitive and loving young man.
He has performed well in the lives of these people, but it is very difficult for such a young man to bear the burden.