20 April 2001 :

Bangkok Post published this editorial: "The sudden execution of five condemned prisoners was meant as a clear message to drug traffickers that they will not be tolerated by this government. But in its haste to make the point that as loudly as possible, the government has failed to consider what type of statement it is making to and about Thai society. More than any other thing, how a society punishes and treats its convicted criminals is the true measure of how civilised that society is. The semi-public execution - where everything except the act of shooting the prisoners was broadcast live - made barbaric spectators out of us all.
Equally reprehensible was the impromptu nature of the execution. The press were informed in the morning and the condemned men were told only a couple of hours before they were put to death that same evening.
It is the duty of the Corrections Department to see to it that executions must be carried out with compassion and dignity. To this end, prisoners should be allowed to meet with family members and close relatives to say their goodbyes before they are executed. In Thailand the authorities will not allow this, out of concern, we suspect, for their own expediency. They simply do not want to deal with grieving relatives. With most of the civilised world moving to abolish the death penalty, a course of action that this newspaper supports, the least that Thailand could do if it is not yet to follow suit, is to make sure that the 320 people still on death row get more humane treatment. The authorities and the rest of Thai society must seriously examine the validity of capital punishment. Deterrence, the chief arguments of proponents of the death penalty, has never been shown to work in any open society.
Most of those arrested for trafficking an astronomic amount of drugs in Thailand may be classified as major drug dealers but in fact they are more likely than not small fries or human mules. Killing them will not make a dent on the drug trade. Executing someone who has been wrongly convicted, a police scapegoat, is also a disturbingly real possibility in this country. And reliance on the death penalty obscures the true causes of crime and distracts attention from the social measures that effectively contribute to its control. Politicians who preach the desirability of execution as a weapon to deter crime deceive the public and mask their own failure to come up with anti-crime measures that will really work.
But most of all a decent and humane society should not deliberately kill human beings. An execution is an officially sanctioned homicide that teaches the permissibility of killing people to solve social problems - the worse possible example to set for society."