The death penalty remains practised in five Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. What these neighbouring countries also have in common is their zero tolerance on drugs. The adoption of the ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric has resulted in capital punishment being extended to drug trafficking offences in these countries between 1975 and 1983. At a glance, they appear to carry out executions at varying frequencies. According to Amnesty International, in 2018, Vietnam executed most prisoners (85+), followed by Singapore (13), Thailand (1), with none recorded for Indonesia and Malaysia. However, a very different picture emerges when we take into account the prisoners who were spared execution due to grants of clemency or pardon. These are cases where a prisoner's death sentence is commuted to a term of imprisonment (often reduced to life imprisonment), or the prisoner is released from custody altogether.

In Last Chance for Life: Clemency in Southeast Asian Death Penalty Cases, Daniel Pascoe examines the clemency patterns in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Pascoe dedicates each chapter to the analysis of the clemency practice in each country between 1991 and 2016 (Chapters 3 to 6). In his final substantive chapter, Pascoe develops three factors that explain the varying clemency rates in four jurisdictions, and possibly beyond (Chapter 7). The first factor concerns the capacity of the criminal justice system to individualise punishments, which he terms ‘lenient discretion’—ie filtering out weak and unmeritorious cases and allowing mitigating circumstances to be taken into account. The second factor that determines the rate of clemency is the extent to which granting clemency enhances or detracts from political power for the final decision-maker. He argues that based on the four countries, clemency grants are more frequent in countries where the decision-maker is not popularly elected, as evidenced by the power to pardon by Thailand's kings and Malaysia's nine rulers in the Malay States. The third factor is the length of time prisoners spend on death row before the clemency petitions are answered. Pascoe argues that the time spent on death row and clemency rate were positively correlated. I found his identification of the three key factors persuasive. These factors pave the way for future research to test these hypotheses and build on them when looking at Southeast Asia and beyond. These factors also provide some pragmatic advice for practitioners preparing for a final appeal for clemency, which Pascoe gives in the Conclusion.

This book clearly stands out from other work on death penalty clemency for embarking on an ambitious empirical project, quantifying and comparing clemency rates in Southeast Asia. Determining a clemency rate requires two figures: the number of executions and the number of clemency grants. While this may seem like a simple task, anyone who has done research on the death penalty would know that this is not at all the case. For example, Vietnam, like other countries, treats death penalty statistics including the number of executions carried out as a State secret; the execution figures quoted above for Vietnam were rare occasions when the authorities chose to share the data.

Thus, Pascoe had the extremely difficult task of navigating through ‘clemency's generally opaque decision-making processes and outcomes and the semi-secretive nature of the four criminal justice systems under study’ (19). Chapter 1 illustrates the complex task of piecing together unofficial data sources and 64 elite interviews with academics, journalists, criminal defence lawyers, NGO staff, government personnel (eg judges, prosecutors, and criminal justice agency officials), and politicians—within and outside of Southeast Asia. I also admire the way Pascoe is transparent about the reliability of his estimates and does not shy away from acknowledging gaps in the data.

Last Chance for Life found that between 1991 and 2016, the rate of clemency granted differed greatly between countries. Singapore had the lowest clemency rate of 1 per cent, compared with Thailand, where more than 95 per cent of prisoners sentenced to death were granted clemency after exhausting judicial appeals. Malaysia (26–40 per cent) and Indonesia (24–33 per cent) fall in between these two extremes.

Finally, Last Chance for Life is a pleasure to read: well-structured, very clearly written and easy to assimilate. It is also the first authoritative resource on death penalty clemency for legal practitioners, policy makers, academics and death penalty abolitionists. The book is a detailed investigation into how and how often Southeast Asian countries avoid executing prisoners who have exhausted all their avenues of appeal. The intention behind the granting of clemency may vary from the decision-makers’ benevolence or political advantage to prisoners’ reformation and rehabilitation, but reading Last Chance for Life will make us appreciate the fact that clemency is practised in Southeast Asian retentionist States with rigid criminal laws and criminal justice processes that may not be equipped to prevent wrongful convictions.