Stretching a tarpaulin over the grave so she could burn incense in pouring rain brought by Typhoon Yagi, Le Van Manh’s 67-year-old mother marked the first anniversary of her son’s death.
"Apart from my family, no one else came down because of the heavy rain and strong winds. People were waiting to escape the storm," said Nguyen Thi Viet.
On Sept. 22, 2023, Hoa Binh Provincial Police executed the death row inmate by lethal injection, in spite of protests by international rights groups and foreign embassies.
Authorities then buried the body of 42-year-old Manh, who had been on death row for 18 years, more than 50 kilometers (31 miles) from his home, before notifying relatives.
In 2005, when he was only 23, Manh was accused of raping and murdering a female student from his village. He was sentenced to death, despite his repeated claims of innocence. He told his mother that police had tortured him into confessing.
Viet told Radio Free Asia the family was campaigning to clear her son’s name. Until then, she said, the family had decided not to repair his grave or move his remains to a cemetery closer to home.
"My child died unjustly, the family is very upset, very sad. The pain in our hearts still rises and has not been able to subside,” she said.
“But the dead are dead. As for the living, our family has decided to stand up and appeal for our child’s innocence until the end of the road to bring him justice.”
She said the family sent petitions to the president, the procuracy and the National Assembly but had yet to receive a response.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions condemned Manh’s execution and called on Vietnam to comply with international commitments to ensure the rights of death row inmates and show transparency in the implementation of sentences.
Amnesty International called the execution "abhorrent," pointing out a serious flaw in the case, the violation of a right to a fair trial and Manh’s claims of torture to extract a confession.
Why maintain the death penalty?
During the third U.N.-initiated Universal Periodic Review, or UPR, in 2019 and the fourth in May this year, dozens of countries recommended that Vietnam abolish the death penalty. However, to date, Vietnam’s National Assembly has announced no plans to update the 2015 penal code, which was amended in 2017, which significantly reduced the number of crimes punishable by death.
The number of death sentences handed down is a state secret, although media regularly report on cases in which defendants are sentenced to death.
According to state media, in a report sent to the National Assembly, the chief prosecutor considered 259 cases for which the death penalty might be imposed, and 338 death sentences. It also issued 258 decisions to deny the right of death row inmates to appeal.
Last April, Truong My Lan, chairwoman of property developer Van Thinh Phat Group, was sentenced to death by a court for embezzlement. Since then, state media reported that at least six more people have been sentenced to death, three for drug trafficking, the others for murder.
"In my opinion, the main reason why the Communist Party of Vietnam continues to carry out the death penalty is to create fear among the people," activist Nguyen Tien Trung told RFA from Germany, where he fled to escape possible prosecution in Vietnam.
“We all know that the one-party regime can rule the entire Vietnamese people based on fear, which means it must rely on violence.”
Trung said that in Manh’s case, the police, the prosecutor and the court committed serious violations, pushing for a speedy verdict to cover up the violations and show they were not swayed by international pressure.
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Human rights lawyer Dang Dinh Manh, who is a refugee in the U.S., said the global trend was to abolish the death penalty and impose a life sentence, which he considered strict enough as a deterrence but also gave authorities the chance to bring about change in a prisoner.
Despite failing to abolish the death penalty, Vietnam has in recent years commuted many death sentences to life imprisonment, without identifying the prisoners.
International pressure continues
The World Organization Against Torture, or OMCT, condemned Vietnam’s use of the death penalty and said the situation was aggravated by its classification of information about its use as a state secret, preventing oversight and accountability.
“Of particular concern is the application of the death penalty to vaguely defined national security offenses,” said Stella Anastasia, co-head of OMCT’s regional desk for Asia & Pacific, Southeast Asia.
“The broad and ambiguous nature of these charges allows the Vietnamese government to systematically misuse them to suppress dissent and silence critics. This raises grave concerns that individuals may be sentenced to death for simply exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of expression and assembly,” she said, even though no one in Vietnam has been sentenced to death in recent years for expressing dissent.
The OCMT said conditions for death row inmates in Vietnam were alarmingly inhumane, with overcrowding, prolonged solitary confinement and the use of shackles that do not meet basic rights standards.
It expressed serious doubts about the effectiveness of domestically produced drugs used for executions, raising concerns that the method could amount to torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.
Anastasia said the OMCT was also troubled by frequent wrongful convictions in murder cases.
“Many cases are tainted by coerced confessions, often extracted through torture, and are based on flawed evidence,” she said.
"High-profile cases such as those of Ho Duy Hai and Le Van Manh exemplify the disturbing reliance on forced confessions and underscore the systemic failures in providing fair legal proceedings."
The OMCT called on Vietnam to abolish the death penalty and, in the interim, to immediately suspend executions.
Amnesty International said it considered the death penalty to be “the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment” and it opposed it without exception.
“Viet Nam continues to shroud executions in secrecy, in what Amnesty International believes to be a blatant attempt to prevent scrutiny that displays added cruelty towards those directly involved,” a spokesperson for the U.K.-based rights group told RFA.
“The secrecy that surrounds figures on the use of the death penalty in the country, coupled with overall lack of transparency on executions and capital proceedings, make it impossible for us to get a sense of the full picture, and of how many people are currently under sentence of death.
“It is high time that the authorities of Vietnam abolished this cruel punishment to comply with its obligations as a state party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and focused on bringing about long-term measures to tackle the root causes of crime.”
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.