The following is a reflection from one of our volunteers on their experience going door-knocking.
By Elijah Tay
This afternoon, members and volunteers of the Transformative Justice Collective visited some residents and chatted with them about the death penalty. While a couple of them initially claimed that they supported the death penalty, when given the opportunity to think about and reflect on their personal views, within minutes, they signed the petition calling for a moratorium on the death penalty and/or expressed support for it.
Many of them resonated on the importance of second chances, believing that people should be given an opportunity to live and improve their lives. Majority of the residents we spoke to also seemed not to be strong supporters of the death penalty, but instead were ambiguous towards or against it. One of them even shared with me that he felt ill-equipped to form an opinion about it because of how inaccessible information about the death penalty is, making it difficult for ordinary people to form opinions about it.
I think our conversations from today reveal that while the government has effectively cultivated an impression of support for the death penalty, this support is easily shaken when people are given the opportunity to think about it, to allow their human intuition to kick in and form their own opinions. When mainstream media constantly regurgitates the state narrative, and when perpetrators of the death penalty would rather debate a foreign billionaire than with fellow citizens on top of resorting to issuing POFMA orders against them, the government deprives the people from our right to freedom of information and our agency to think critically; there is a huge knowledge gap in our supposed democracy.
It is important for us to keep asking questions and generating counter-narratives so that we all get the opportunity to make sense of our society, and change what doesn’t. The holidays are approaching, and there’s no gift greater than life.
🚪 Join us on our door-knocking efforts by dropping us a DM via @transformjustice.sg.
✍️ If you haven’t, sign the petition at change.org/StopTheKillingSG and encourage your peers to sign it too. Let’s get to 50k signatures together by the end of 2025.
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