The Killing of Flor Contemplacion : Singapore: In a land efficient in many ways, including the execution of the death penalty, there’s no place for doubt.

What if O.J. Simpson went on trial in Singapore?

It’s a question I’ve been thinking about after my home country’s latest scandal, the hanging of Philippine maid Flor Contemplacion. Like O.J. Simpson, Flor was charged with the murder of two people, but some believe she was framed.

Unlike O.J., however, Flor Contemplacion is now dead. The 42-year-old maid went to the gallows last month, despite new claims that she was falsely accused. And in a postscript to Singapore’s efficiency, her family was notified in advance when to pick up the body.

The whole story makes me shiver. But it’s really just an example of the order on which Singapore thrives, taken to a frightening extreme.

Singapore is a country where things are black and white. Life is made to fit within neat boundaries, just as tropical plants are coaxed into neat borders along the country’s roads.

The key to this tidiness is having clear rules with clear outcomes. Break the rules and you are punished. Follow them and you are rewarded.

The perils of ignoring the rules became widely known last year after the caning of American teen-ager Michael Fay, convicted of vandalism.

But if Fay’s fate is an example of the stick, Singapore also holds out carrots. If you want to work, you will have a job. And if you work hard, you will live in comfort and safety.

Those are far from guaranteed in American society, where both reward and punishment come in shades of gray. Gray is a color Singaporeans do not like.

That’s why Singapore arranges life to be as predictable as its weather: constantly warm, with no seasons, no earthquakes, no floods, nothing that breaches the seams of order.

In its penchant for order, my country has outlawed chewing gum, waged a national campaign against spitting and shown a censored version of George Orwell’s “1984,” completely losing the irony. It has founded a Social Development Unit, a nationwide dating service for educated singles, like a government-run “Love Connection.”

It even offers tax breaks to university graduates who reproduce, in an effort to fashion a smarter society. If I were in Singapore now, I would be paid to have more children.

The hanging of Flor Contemplacion took place despite an outcry in the Philippines and two appeals for a delay from Philippine President Fidel Ramos.

Ramos didn’t request a pardon--just a delay, to investigate more fully the claims of two new witnesses. The first claimed that Contemplacion was framed by a Singaporean who was said to have killed one of the victims, his son’s maid, after the boy drowned in the bathtub. The second witness said that Contemplacion’s confession was coerced in jail.

Singapore dismissed the new evidence as false, noting that Contemplacion had confessed to killing the boy and the maid, pleading not guilty by reason of insanity--a plea some suggest was recommended by her Singaporean lawyers.

And so Flor Contemplacion was sent to her death.

Her execution makes me fear that the rules that once shaped my society are now squeezing the life out of it.

I know that Singapore’s social harmony and economic prosperity were built on rules. But life is messy, and it doesn’t always play by the rules, not even on an island state with fewer than 3 million people. And when life throws its curve balls, surely the law must bend with them. Would a delay for Flor Contemplacion really have flouted the law? Or would it have stretched and eventually strengthened the law by throwing more weight behind the outcome of the case, whatever its conclusion?

That’s not a question Singapore asked. And frankly, it’s not a question I would ask if I were still there. An ocean away, I still thought twice about writing this.

On this side of the ocean, there’s a lot that I still don’t fully understand about this country, such as why Michael Fay was rewarded with an offer of a movie contract, or why the Simpson trial is a national obsession.

But I know that Simpson is banking on reasonable doubt, which is by definition gray. And I know that even if Simpson was sentenced to death, appeals and counterappeals could delay his death for years.

Flor Contemplacion didn’t even get an extra day.