I know very little of Truong My Lan, the billionaire sentenced to death last week, but I do know that capital punishment for a 'victimless crime' (completely untrue framing, but that's often how white collar crime is characterized) is pretty damn severe. We are empathetic creatures, so we typically need to see direct correlation between victim and perpetrator in the eyes of the law to deem such a penalty - shaving off a few percentage points of a given fund at a massive scale to amass vast quantities of wealth typically doesn't satiate the empathic need for justice like one may get when there is a murderer or terrorist getting this penalty.
This is an example of a larger fact and they are indeed making an example of this woman - do not mess with southeast Asia when it comes to crime. They may not have the strongest militaries, or the most stable governments, but with crime it's scary business - this may just be hearsay/conjecture and I don't really plan on doing the requisite research, but I'm pretty sure you can get executed in Singapore for possessing marijuana, and it's swinging more authoritarian right in the last decade or so.
Alright I did indeed fact check and this is what Google spit back to me:
Laws in Singapore permit the death penalty for people convicted of trafficking more than 15 grams of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine, 250 grams of meth, or 500 grams of cannabis. As of August 9, 2023, there are 50 people currently on death row in Singapore, only three of whom were convicted of murder.
Yikes... good thing I'm not a drugs guy, but if I were I'd definitely need to play my 'I'm cool with the Asian community, Producer Reese said so' card if I were to get in trouble. Pretty sure in Indonesia (the 4th most populous country in the world, crazy - shoutout to our CTO Ezy) you can go to prison for having sex out of wedlock in certain parts - luckily I'm abstinent these days so that wouldn't be an issue #discipline.
In the Philippines? Who the hell knows what's going on out that way - I'm sure it's awesome but with all of these small islands making up the country as a whole, each island is going to have their own culture of enforcing the law, and there are likely very different laws by province (as there are in the US with state and local).
Back to our girl Truong... what does the due process look like in all of this? Is there an opportunity for appeal? How do they go about doing this? Bananas... feel like the white collar guys out here get nothing more than a slap on the wrist and real estate speculation is just part of the game of sales. Appeals can take decades, if not a lifetime for capital punishment in the states, as in most folks just die on death row - doubt their process is as scrupulous, but could still be a while. Not a capital punishment fan, allocation resources way too inefficient, but we will indeed see what comes out of Ho Chi Minh.
Word to the wise for when we go over and visit our boy Andy at Sartoro HQ and Ezy down in Bali next year.
P.S. Should an SF based blog be more focused on issues like the idiots who keep protesting and disrupting the local economy than capital punishment over in a far away foreign land? Probably - protesters impeding on others is a criminal action and is not peaceful and should include an arrest after fair warning - you're welcome, Tavis.
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Remind me not to commit fraud down here 👀😠also she got caught at $44 billion, so that tells us the limit is $43 billion 😂
Don't want the Raven Empire to get too large...