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Communist Vietnam's secret death penalty conveyor belt: How country trails only China and Iran for 'astonishing' number of executions

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Prisoners are dragged from their cells at 4am without warning to be given a lethal injection Vietnam's use of the death penalty has been thrust into the spotlight after a real estate tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to be executed in one of the biggest corruption cases in the country's history. Truong My Lan, a businesswoman who chaired a sprawling company that developed luxury apartments, hotels, offices and shopping malls, was arrested in 2022.

Pictures at an execution: The condemned in art

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A new exhibition aims to humanise condemned prisoners. From the sword to the electric chair, the death penalty has inspired challenging art, writes Jason Farago.

One man, before dying, said, “I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me.” Another said, “I’m going to a beautiful place.” A third: “I am innocent, innocent, innocent.”

Those were their last words before an executioner took their lives. And for Amy Elkins, a young artist based in Los Angeles, those testaments offered a means to humanise the grim statistics of the death penalty in the United States. Her photography series – which was awarded this year’s Aperture Portfolio Prize and goes on view in New York next month – overlays the mugshots of the condemned with text of their final words, coursing down the image like the current of a river. Another series features letters Elkins exchanged with death row prisoners, including several in solitary confinement, interspersed with photographs the artist took in an effort to simulate their thoughts. A seascape, a forest, an expanse of concrete : these images, mundane in other circumstances, become through Elkins the inner worlds of men whom the state will destroy.

“People write of capital punishment as if they were whispering,” argued Albert Camus, the most implacable of death-penalty opponents, in his 1957 Reflections on the Guillotine . To an extent, we still do. This year several US states, facing a shortage of drugs for lethal injections thanks to a European moratorium, resorted to untested and unreliable combinations that resulted in severe pain and, in one case, a failed execution . Though campaigners condemned the executions as barbaric and inhumane, and though support for capital punishment has declined in the United States, these botched lethal injections spurred little public discussion. Today, although the death penalty is illegal in all but 22 countries , we still write about it in a whisper, preferring not to see the consequences of society’s ultimate sentence. Can art speak more loudly? It certainly has throughout art history; perhaps it can again.


Source: BBC News, October 14, 2014
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