The hand of justice was kept very busy this week. Three deaths, and each accused faced three different sentences - 30 years, 22.5 years and 4 years (3 years suspended, effectively making it only one year of prison time).
All three gavels struck the sounding block firmly, letting out an ominous echo along the dark corridor of humanity. It is a lesson in the courtroom which effectively stretched the hand of justice from the most undeserving to the most deserving.
Singaporean housewife Gaiyathiri, 41, caused the death of her maid, Ms Piang Ngaih Don, 24 (30 years jail). Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, 45, ended up killing George Floyd, 46 (22.5 years jail).
And a mother, French Ms Valerie Bacot, 40, shot her rapist stepdad, Daniel Polette, 61, who was also her husband (4 years, 3 years suspended).
Mind you, all three accused are not natural born killer, for a lack of a proper term; not even by a long shot. No doubt opinions will surely be divided between the three of them, but I believe the general consensus is that they are no Dr Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs (1988), a serial killer who eats his victims.
You don’t need to be pathological or sociopathic to end up taking a life. You may be a homemaker (Gaiyathiri and Valerie) or an enforcer of the law (Derek), and one unsuspecting day, you find yourself at the receiving end of the gavel strike.
And all three of them brought with them not just extreme emotional and mental baggages when they committed the offences, but for Derek, the police officer, he became the law, for more than 9 minutes in May 2020, when he pinned George onto the road and choked him to death.
In that 9 minutes or so, George could be heard crying out more than 20 times that he could not breathe. In the courtroom, Derek said: “I do want to give my condolences to the Floyd family.”
As for Gaiyathiri, we know what she did to her maid. It was reported in every major newspaper here. It was 9 months of living hell for Ms Piang. She started at 39kg, and at her death, in July 2016, she weighed only 24kg.
The abuses were unspeakable. The prosecution even asked for the court’s “righteous anger” to be invoked to jail Gaiyathiri for life.
Ms Piang was kicked, choked twice, slapped, punched, stamped on and her hair was pulled. She was deliberately starved, given only cold rice and sliced bread soaked in water, and had to sneak into the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning to eat food from the dustbin.
Ms Piang was also made to shower with door opened and “tied to the window grille at night while she slept on the floor during the last 12 days of her life - so that she would not be able to eat food from the dustbin.”
Yet, Gaiyathiri had no history of maid abuse with her previous maids - at least no reports were ever lodged. She was also suffering from depression (while pregnant with her son) and had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (“OCPD”), which the prosecution admitted contributed significantly to her offences (all 28 charges).
Her father told ST that she was a “normal person” who was “fussy about cleanliness but changed significantly after the birth of her second child.”
Even High Court Judge See said that Gaiyathiri “did not appear to have been a pathologically violent person prior to her offences and was not thought to be at risk of re-offending or to pose a danger to the public.”
Yet, what she had done, for that 9 months of dehumanizing torture, committed with a high degree of deliberation, was “among the worst cases of culpable homicide,” so remarked Judge See.
If one thinks Gaiyathiri is a “normal person”, here’s another normal person by the name of Valerie, a mother/wife who killed her husband/stepfather.
When Valerie left the courtroom, freed on Friday, she was met with thunderous applause. More than 700k petition was filed for her early release. This is her story of terror, over many years.
When Valerie was 12, her mother’s boyfriend, Polette, raped her. After Polette was released, he continued to sexually abuse Valerie until she was pregnant at 17. Her alcoholic mother threw her out of the house and forced her to live with Polette.
Over the years, Valerie was attacked with a hammer, kicked repeatedly, punched and almost choked to death. She described her life as an “extreme hell”. Polette also used Valerie as a sex worker for him.
One of the last straws was when Polette “started questioning their 14-year-old daughter Karline about her budding sexuality.” That was when Valerie decided that “this has to stop”.
“In March 2016, after Polette ordered his wife (Valerie) to undergo yet another sexual humiliation by a client, she used the pistol that he kept in the car to kill him with a single bullet to the back of the neck as he sat in the driver’s seat.”
Valerie confessed that after she shot him, she hid his body in a forest with the help of two of her children.
I know this does not make for a good Sabbath reading this morning, but all three lives taught me something about human nature, its darker side. It allowed me to catch a glimpse of the extreme effects of what is the intersection between human nature and nurture.
We cannot fully understand what Gaiyathiri did apart from her depression and her OCPD. This may be one of genetic predisposition at birth. No doubt she still had a choice, or many choices before the last straw, and yet, she chose to dehumanise Ms Piang just because the circumstances allowed her to.
Nobody heard Ms Piang’s cries for help in that nine months. Those who might have crossed her path walked on by, because they didn’t think Gayathiri was capable of such unspeakable acts. She is a normal person to them.
Mind you, Gaiyathiri insisted that Ms Piang showered before 6 pm because she “said her prayers at 6 pm and considered it to be a bad omen if the women in the flat had not showered by the time of her prayers.”
Alas, is this a mind distorted, warped beyond comprehension, or a normal person who is pushed to the edge by her circumstances, or both?
How about Derek? Isn’t he the byproduct of a broken system, where justice is skewed by race, colour and income gap?
For sure, he is as normal as normal comes by. Yet, in that 9 minutes he became the judge, jury and executioner. I am sure, like Gaiyathiri, he is a loving parent, and would do anything for his kids. Yet, when it comes to law enforcement, he practiced selective justice and carried it to the extreme.
And Valerie, what can we say about her and her actions?
In fact, the prosecution in her case said: ““Valerie Bacot should not have taken the life of the person who was terrorising her, (but judges) should ”uphold the transgression” without incarcerating her again.””
How do you then “uphold the transgression” and then ask for her to be released as soon as possible? Maybe, in her case, nurture played a greater role. She was forced by circumstances mostly beyond her control and the last straw was when her 14-year-old daughter’s life was at risk.
She dealt with a monster the best way she knew how. Her justice challenged every aspect of the rule of law and its sentencing goals, because every abuse she had suffered in the hands of the one she had killed added up to give her defensible cause to take the law into her own hands.
And in her case, justice in the courtroom saw fit not only to turn her eyes away from her crime, but also to tilt the balance in her favour.
Indeed, when you look at the whole spectrum of human nature/actions and the different circumstances they face, some much more extreme than others, you get a better, more nuanced and mature picture of the demands on, for and of justice, and also its degree and depth.
Most times, the gavel is light and easily finds the sound block. But at other times, the gavel is heavy, and lifting it up and hammering it down take more than just a reflex-like deliberation.
In any event, these three cases have forced me to think more critically of what we are capable of, even if we think we are never capable of such acts. And I end with this quote that nudges me softly in that direction: -
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
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