Pro-caning letters flood newspaper

Pro-caning letters flood newspaper

SINGAPORE (AFP): Singapore's leading Straits Times daily has been deluged with letters from the public supporting the court- ordered caning of an American teenager for vandalizing cars, an editor said yesterday.

"We have received more than 120 letters since the sentencing. Ninety percent of them are pro-caning while the remainder are neutral or ask for more humane treatment," said Forum Page editor Yong Ah Seng.

Yong published a full page of seven letters yesterday, only one of which was sympathetic to Michael Peter Fay, 18, who is seeking clemency from President Ong Teng Cheong in a last bid to escape the caning which could leave permanent scars on his buttocks.

On Thursday, the Straits Times' sister publication The New Paper, an afternoon tabloid, carried a gory account of caning given by a convicted rapist, who received 15 strokes for gang- raping a Filipina maid in 1988.

The unnamed 28-year-old man said he was taken into a room where two policeman, a medical doctor, three muscular men who were to administer the caning and a cluster of canes, each as thick as a thumb, awaited him.

He was tied to an A-frame wooden structure, his shorts pulled down and his groin cushioned with a piece of cloth before the caning started.

"It sounded like a tree falling onto my buttocks. First a stinging blow to my buttocks and when the rotan (cane) was lifted, I could feel blood shooting up from my body," he said.

"The pain was unbearable and it got more painful. With each new stroke, I became giddy and grew nauseous and weak. My body shook with pain," the man said.

After the last stroke, the doctor applied a medicated lotion to the wounds.

For the next three weeks, he slept face down and could neither eat nor sleep.

The wounds took a month to heal but the scars, the memories and the pain remained.

"I can't lift heavy objects and I can't sit for long hours. That brings pain to my lower back," the man told an NBC-News correspondent during an interview attended by The New Paper.

Fay is now in Queenstown prison awaiting caning after Singapore's Chief Justice Yong Pung How dismissed his appeal against the lower court order of six strokes and four months imprisonment last week.

The Dayton, Ohio native, admitted to spray-painting two cars and allowed the judge to consider for sentencing 16 other vandalism charges all committed within a spate of 10 days last September.

Fay's lawyers said they were preparing his petition and had been given until April 20 to submit it to Ong.

The U.S. embassy here said it regretted that the caning order was not withdrawn, saying the U.S. government continued to believe that caning "is an excessive penalty for a youthful non- violent offender who pleaded guilty to a reparable crime to private property."

U.S. President Bill Clinton has urged the Singapore government to reconsider the court decision, calling the caning "extreme" but the Singapore government has said it would not intervene.

Most analysts here believe Singapore is unlikely to bow to U.S. pressure because 14 others between the ages of 18 and 21, among them two foreigners, have been previously caned for vandalism.