Michael Fay's Caning Appreciation Week Begins!

The 20th Anniversary of Michael Fay’s Caning Sentencing Has Arrived Today!

Oh, how 1994 was such a great year for learning about the peculiar Asian criminal penalty, caning. I remember it like it was yesterday. I have pics from every major US publication still. It brought corporal punishment to the fore in the U.S. like never before. I couldn’t believe how many folks would blithely say, “Yep, we should cane punks like Fay here.”

Remember in NYC in 1994, Rudy Guliani hadn’t renovated the city yet, so there was ugly graffiti everywhere? New Yorkers were very much all about the caning.

According mostly to wikipedia, in Singapore in 1993, The Straits Times began to run stories about a rash of car vandalism. Unknown individuals, thought at first to be residents of the HDB apartments in which 85% of the local population lives, damaged their neighbors' cars with hot tar, paint remover, and hatchets. Taxi drivers complained that their tires were slashed.

In the city center and the condos, cars were found with deep scratches and dents. One man interviewed by the Straits Times complained that he had to refinish his car six times in six months. In the fall of 1993 a vandal took red spray paint to six cars in a garage off Orchard Lane, making the vandalism highly visible. The next night someone sprayed a line of red paint right through the official seal of a judge's car that had been left out on the street.

Hot on the heels of this really surprising vandalism in Singapore of all places, the police eventually arrested a 16-year-old suspect, Andy Shiu Chi Ho. He was not caught vandalizing cars, but was charged with driving his father's car without a license. After questioning Shiu, the police questioned several expatriate students from the Singapore American School, including Michael Fay, and later charged them with more than fifty counts of vandalism.

Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing the cars in addition to stealing road signs. He later maintained that he was advised that such a plea would preclude caning and that his confession was false, that he never vandalized any cars, and that the only crime he committed was stealing signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act, originally passed to curb the spread of political graffiti and which specifically covered vandalism of government property, Fay was sentenced on March 3, 1994 to four months in jail, a fine of $2,214 and six strokes of the cane.

The Embassy of Singapore to the United States said it received "a flood of letters" from Americans strongly supporting Fay's punishment, and some polls showed a majority of Americans favored it.

The London Times in May 1994 gave the details:

Special Thanks to Colin Farrell at Corpun.com for this image; find out more here.

Later that year, on June 26, 1994, in New York Times article interviewed Fay who gave gross detail about his bloody bottom from his nonconsensual adult caning.

U.S. Student Tells of Pain Of His Caning In Singapore

Published: June 26, 1994

The 19-year-old American who was caned in Singapore for vandalism said today that the bleeding it caused was "like a bloody nose."

The teen-ager, Michael P. Fay, said in an interview that the four strokes with a rattan cane on May 5 had left three dark-brown scars on his right buttock and four lines each about half-an-inch wide on his left buttock.

In his first description of the caning, Mr. Fay said that prison officials told him he shouted, "I'm dying," when the first stroke was delivered. He said he could not remember making the cry.

He said a prison officer stood beside him and guided him through the ordeal, saying: "O.K. Michael, three left. O.K., Michael, two left. O.K., one more; you're almost done."