Death Penalty

A day of sadness and shame for the Asian-Oceanian region

There is surely no excuse for a a modern state: Asian,  European , African, American....and certainly not Oceanian...to support the death penalty

On a day when we are all concerned about the heaving casualties of great human tragedy in Nepal....our hearts are opened to  "a country like this......a  city like this" .
Our common humanity should remind us that we are citizens of a Common World. where  it is convenient to suggest we are privileged to live in security.

We will forget most likely about Sukumaran and Chan, executed this morning in Indonesia,......the stupid boys who became men in prison and then were slaughtered.

While there is some evidence to suggest that the 'ordinary' Australian community still has a hefty proportion of people who think it's OK to execute people.....if nothing else good has come out of this latest injustice in Indonesia it is that Australian political will appears to have been galvanised.
 against the death penalty. Equally well there is a serious issue about the way popular media has or has not aggravated this situation

One moderate commentator said this morning when the argument that "they had been rehabilitated" was again being put forward....'Well they were not there to be rehabilitated but to be......." and the conversation sort of tailored off.
I presume he was going to say punished!
Having been to Gaol in the last couple of weeks (here) I tried to talk about the process of reconciliation that the modern gaol is supposed to be on about. Mobilong Gaol seems to be doing pretty well in rehabilitating others.

Gaol is not just about punishment....though that is legitimate....we also should be about rehabilitation.

Both Chan and Sukumaran  appear to have been seriously and wonderfully rehabilitated...almost against all odds... there seems little reason to think that this is anything but genuine.

There are bigger questions too:  China continues to be the biggest executor . Dare we confront this powerful trading partner
The US, our most powerful ally,  is the most shameful and strident country participating in executions.  Where is our criticism of them?

There is much more to be said about this.

Till death do us part

There is yet another flutter of people talking about reintroduction of the death penalty. It always rather turns my gut as I fear that those opposed have rather dropped their guard. We tend to feel that that debate is long, long behind us. I am not so sure.
Those in favour of its reintroduction foten seem so strident. And it is, of course, such an emotional issue.
One seemingly rational correspondent to the local paper today critiques an observation earlier in the week that so-called 'right to lifers' (anti abortionists) often seem pro-death penalty. They note (The Advertiser February 26) that 'there is a vast difference between the killing of adults who have committed atrocious crimes and innocent babies'.
But I make the point in a letter to the Ed (yet to be published) "That is until, as has often been the case, the adult is found to be not guilty."
This is a real difficulty with the death penalty. It's a bit ghastly to discover after an execution that there may be doubt and/or even fresh evidence which calls a judgment into question.

It is not the only difficulty. Simply the most obvious.

To my mind the substantive problem is about a society that believes it has the right to take away life. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea, for example, that a society believes that no one has the right to kill another person. And yet punishes such a transgression by killing another person!

To what end

We are all no doubt pleased that State Opposition leader Isabel Redmond has apparently survived being tasered and 'didn't flinch'. She claims this is not a stunt...if it is not then why do it?

But really this sort of approach to policy is ridiculous. The most absurd would be for proponents of the death penalty to submit to injection/electrocution/gassing...or whatever ...in order to prove that it is 'humane'. This sort of example suggests that being tasered proves nothing at all...other than that attempting to prove the 'humanity' of tasering is pretty pointless; just as attempting to prove the humanity of the death sentence, or corporal punishment or water-boarding by actually submitting to it is futile. It only proves that you (the foolish one who so submits) happily survived it.

There needs to be some more serious thought given to what more objective criteria should be adopted. The emotionalism of a politician undertaking the test, is as futile as the child of the 50s who protests "My father strapped me and ti hasn't done me any harm!"

Until such time as we have more objective criteria, then let us be a bit more circumspect about the promotion of state-sanctioned violence.

The price is eternal vigilance

Nothing gives me the willies like the death sentence. Every now and then it just creeps up behind you and you think..."Given half a chance the populace would vote for it."
Its stupidity is exposed from time to time, and indeed its evil nature.
The announcement this week that China will execute two people involved in the milk scandal (you know where stuff got into milk, lollies...etc... and people died as a result) exposes some things about the death sentence that are worth noting.
Now China is China, and because they are big, influential and rich we usually just shut up and let them get on with it. But this is ridiculous.
Even in Texas they don't execute people for industrial malfeisance. It rather exposes that what China does so often with its penalties is to demonstrate that it is doing the right thing (in its eyes)...it is not punishing, it is showing it is tough.
Because we can see that it is stupid to even consider execution for such crime, it raises the question of whether it is justified for anything. Just what does it achieve other than the sense that we are tough.
What gives me the willies, then, is the fear that the bully in us..as nations and as individuals...often just wins out.It is not, and is never, about rationality.

Great admiration

I have only the greatest admiration for the relatives of British victims of the Bali bombers who urge Indonesia to not execute them (here).
I am becoming more and more convinced that as logical as it might seem, those of us who oppose the death penalty should oppose it!
Even for those who like the insanely laughing Amrosi and Imam Samudra seem prime candidates.
The issue about the death penalty should be separated from particular cases. That way madness lies.
If it is wrong (and I believe it is) then it is wrong for Himmler, for Milosovic and for Amrosi.
Surely we can adopt a more moral stand than this.

In the midst of life we seek death

Have we been seduced into a phoney discussion about the death penalty in Australia in  this pre-election insanity?

I always feared that in a period of chaos or unclear decision making, where leaders are more intent on getting re-elected than leading, that we would get some opportunist who would lead us back to the unthinkable position of reintroducing the death penalty.

So here are ten early-morning reasons why the death penalty is wrong

1. What if you get the wrong person?  This is the most obvious and yet most easily overlooked reason. But the stories about this are legendary. Our legal system is not based on certainty it is based on probablility...beyond reasonable doubt. It may be OK in some people's mind to send people to jail when you are 90% sure of their guilt, and accept the risk that in one out of ten cases you may be wrong, at least the innocent can be set free. The dead cannot be brought back to life.
2. It diminishes the State Most of us understand that the State should try to be exemplary, it should respond to our aspirations rather than our fear or anger. This is a difficult enough path to tread at the best of times. We do know that we should be careful and respectful of human life. The State should be at the forefront of that particular aspiration, not the principal player in reaking vengeance. I think that if we look at States that have the death penalty, the US, China...we see that these great nations are not improved but that they are diminished by such poverty of policy.
3. It is playing God.  This is not a particularly religious argument. It is about deciding that in our society that the chief safeguard on human life is the presumption that no one person or institution will act to take away the life of another. Even in the face of guilt, we say that the sanctity of life is such that we do not validate another person's guilt, or the general poor application of the law by doing what that person has done (taking a life). We remove from individuals the presumption that this decision can be made without reference to higher moral authority, and with the inability to be able to certainly discern that with any absolute certainty...ie we do not know that we have the right to do this,  we don't do it. Wherever you get your moral authority from (we call it 'God' in this example) this argument is still cogent
4. It is a poor and selective reading of the Bible. This again may not be particularly religious. It is about the sort of narrow reading of authoritative sources to only back up our case. So we will tire of hearing "An eye for an eye", as Ghandi is oft (mis)quoted as saying "An eye for eye leads to a world of blind people".  The truth is that the appeal to these sorts of external authorities like the Bible is so often the desire to paint in black and white what is clearly in all shades of grey. We could equally well cite "vengeance is mine says the Lord, I  will repay" or "I desire  mercy not sacrifice". Let alone as we begin to unfold that we are not a Judaeo society alone, but that a Judaeo-Christian society is not stuck in the brutal land of the "lex talionis" but is one which seeks 'a more excellent way'. This begs the question that, in Australia at least, there are a myriad of other cultural, religious and moral influences that need to be weighed
5. It confuses the notion of what sentencing and punishment is about Again it is easy to think that we sentence people to punsh them for their crimes, but in a civilised society we also seek to rehabilitate. It is a civilised thing to do to work with those who have wronged even when we are angered by their guilt, and offended by their crimes (indeed particularly when this is so) to seek their rehabilitation. It is a big and presumptuous call to say that anyone is beyond rehabilitation. To often the temptation to do this is this simplistic response to see this as black and white. 
6. It is an expensive option Necessarily the death penalty must be subject to the highest level of appeal. The American system shows that this can be lengthy and expensive.
7. It may actually exacerbate the problem of terrorism rather than ease it For the life of me I cannot see how martyrs are actually deterred by the death penalty
8. It is socially and racially abusive and prejudicial Given the undeniable reality that aboriginal and poor people are over-represented in our prison systems, we must begin with the assumption that these people will also be more in danger of the death penalty than others. It is not that these people are more guilty (a ludicrously simplistic solution) but that there are other social reasons which need to be addressed. To throw the death penalty into this complex mix is to further compound the idea of injustice.
9. It is brutal, not civilised Not all will agree but in a world where Western Judaeo-Christian society so often takes the moral high ground, at some point we must acknowledge that the taking of life is a brutish act. Even if we allow another to deliver the injection, or pull the lever or fire the shot; we are promoting lack of compassion rather than mercy. Indignation, however righteous or not, does not justify such brutishness
10. It simply is not logical. In the end taking another person's life will do nothing. Nothing! to bring back a dead person. It will not ease the pain. It will not make any grieving person feel better. It may actually make matters worse

The slippery slide

There is nothing more certain than the death penalty is  treacherous political ground.

Comments yesterday by Labor frontbencher Robert McLelland  about the death penalty brought a sort of diplomatic rebuke from Kevin Rudd.

McLelland outlined (it seems to me) what is the official position of all major parties and that is that they are opposed to the death sentence. The case in point is Indonesia's application of the death penalty against the so-called Bali bombers.

That there has been a weakening of the position of absolute opposition to death as penal sentence there can be little doubt. The PM has for a long time declared a general unwillingness to ask death promoting governments to commute death sentences.

The official process seems to be that when Australians are sentenced to death we express some opposition, but increasingly it seems that when crimes have been heinous our principles have become a bit gelatinous. We may ask, but not very hard.

McLelland merely said that we are not just opposed to the death penalty for Australians, but we think it is barbaric and inhuman for anyone.

It is not particularly surprising that Howard should decline to ask for the death sentence to not be applied to those Indonesians who perpetrated the Bali massacrs. It is perhaps a little surprising that he should so vehemently declare that as an Australian he finds it very difficult to stick to his principles in the face of the deaths of 88 or so fellow country men and women.

There is, no doubt, a political expediency....since a huge swathe of the electorate is seduced by the notion that the death penalty solves things.

How the death penalty discourages people who see martyrdom as a victory I do not know?

What is more disgusting, is Rudd's sidesteppping the issue and seeming to chastise his colleague, for what (as Minister Downer has pointed out) is his and his party's position. That they are opposed not just to the death penalty for Australians but for any person.

There is no "aspirational" or principled leadership in this country.

There is only electoral fear. Fear that at the next or any election the redneck element will vote you out.

Too bad that those of us who want more principle and less weakness and vacillation appear to be  well in the minority.

Talking Heads

The execution of Saddam Hussein's 2-i-c rather makes the point about the death penalty that I have been trying not to pontificate about.
In the course of the execution his head came apart from his body.
The official spokesman (in all seriousness) assured the news conference...

"I want to assure you the rope did not break, the head just (sic) became separated from the body"

If we had any doubts about the barbarism of the death penalty this should dispel them. This little encounter demonstrates how our perceptions get twisted, and we begin to rationalise the irrational and defend the indefensible.
One only has to read Stephen King's "The Green Mile" which has 3 or 4 well crafted descriptions of executions in the electric chair ( which are clearly based on real-life accounts) to realise that it is nopt a sanitary affair, and indeed unnecessarily cruel.
Oh, how arrogant we are if and when we think we can be masters and mistresses of God's domain

legalised murder---as predicted

I for one will not sleep better tonight knowing that once again the world has executed another human being.
No matter how "evil" we might assume or presume him to be there is a certain sense of irony that those who so loudly bey for the blood of such men as Saddam Hussein, so loudly decry the life taken through abortion or euthanasia.
I do not condone either of those courses of action, but find it rather disturbing that death penalty protagonists don't get this profound contradiction. see the ABC story here

Death be not proud

One of my lurking fears is the reintroduction of the death penalty. Nothing it seems to me so betrays our corporate humanity as the desire to kill each other. That we should choose to do it 'legally' is profoundly confronting. One can criticise illegal acts, and violence...but when someone is killed by legal prescript then we are making a profound statement about our values.
We can all understand why people think Saddam should be executed, that doesn't mean we should do it. In fact I find it rather disturbing that so few voices (if any) can be heard saying that the death penalty is wrong. Just plain wrong.
One of the ironies is that it allows the voice of evil itself to paint himself as a martyr. That is an obscenity.
I go on record as saying that I believe no good is achieved by executing criminals. I do not think Saddam should be legally murdered (an oxymoron if ever there was one).
If anything Hussein should be left to rot in jail like Hess, an ongoing reminder to future generations of his evil.
He will, of course, be subect to the blood lust of the Iraqis but more realistically of the American administration. Less than human behaviour by those who claim the moral high ground.