A Deathly Debate
byDerrynHinch
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Thursday, 05 March 2015
The life clock ticks
Photo Courtesy of: smh.com.au
DON’T GET ME wrong. I think a firing squad is barbaric. The lead up itself for Chan and Sukumaran would qualify as ‘cruel and inhuman punishment’ as decreed by the US Supreme Court.
But don’t count me in as one of the ‘millions of Australians’ Tony Abbott claims are backing his attempted interference in the Indonesian justice system to have their sentences commuted.
I’m one of the 52% in the latest poll who think these greedy merchants of death knew what they were doing, took the risk, exposed their underlings to 20 years in the slammer and are now paying the ultimate ‘risk tax’.
They apparently have been rehabilitated in the decade they have been appealing against their sentence for trying to smuggle more than eight kilos of heroin from Bali to Australia.
Commendable. But it shouldn’t surprise you how many men find God in jail – and then somehow lose him again once they get out.
Andrew Chan is now an ordained minister although, at the weekend, one of his Bali 9 mules described how the newly-anointed pastor had described religion as ‘crap’.
(He didn’t speak to Chan in jail for a long time because he was one of the mug drug carriers who tried to pull out just before the job but was told by ‘the enforcer’ that ‘we know where your family lives’ and “we even know their names”.)
While Abbott, Bishop, Shorten and Co.are holding photo opportunity dawn vigils in Canberra I wonder if they even know the names or nationalities of the other nine men facing execution on that island?
What about the French father of four about to take a bullet for running an ecstasy factory in Indonesia? Maybe he’s been rehabilitated.
And have they been protesting about the woman in Georgia who was due to be executed for killing her husband but had it postponed for a couple of days?
Julie Bishop has now apparently offered to trade three Indonesians, jailed here for life with a 25-year minimum, for the Bali duo’s commutation. Even though we don’t have a prisoner-exchange program with Jakarta.
Those three tried to smuggle 250 kilograms of smack into Australia by boat.
Does this mean the Foreign Minister plans to trade foreigners in our jails for all Aussies behind bars overseas? And if not, why not?
If I sound cynical, it is because our Canberra protectors have just reconvened a group called Australian Parliamentarians Against the Death Penalty. They organised today’s dawn vigil on the steps of Parliament House.
Where were they when the Bali bombers were taken out and shot? Surely, Amarosi and team had been rehabilitated too? Maybe even found God?
I actually respect people who are totally opposed to capital punishment. People who genuinely believe that no man, no government, nor legal system, has the right to take another human’s life.
But I’ll admit I struggle when I think of that monster Ivan Milat and the innocent backpacker murders, or Martin Bryant or Julian Knight or Daniel’s Morcombe’s killer.
I publicly opposed the death penalty for 25 years until I read Anita Cobby’s autopsy report and saw proof of what those sick creatures did to a nurse on her way home from work.
Can’t convince me that those evil people had the slightest right to continue breathing in any civilised community.