To ask if you know about the executions taking place today?

[kewtogetin]

I have been following the case of the 'Bali 9' for years but it seems today is the end of the road for Andrew chan and myuran sukumaran. They are due to be executed at 5pm UK time.
I have just watched their families leaving the jail for the last time after saying their final goodbyes. It was heartbreaking. This is not really a post about the rights and wrongs of the death penalty (although I am massively against) but I can't help feeling this is more of a punishment for the families than for those who committed the crime.
I believe death isn't the punishment but fear. Saying goodbye to your children/parents etc, being marched through the rain forest, tied to a wooden stake with a hood over your head and then shot through the heart. It's just barbaric.....
What do you think? And no 'if you can't do the time don't do the crime' spouters please. Two men (actually 2 of 11 I believe) will die today but glorying in it is disrespectful at best.

We live in Australia, and for months, the Bali 9 have been on the news.

I had a relative dying of overdose, so I am not overly sympathetic of drug smugglers, especially not the ones organizing it, like the two Australians executed this morning.

We are talking about cold head planning, recruiting, buying and hiding more than 8kg of heroin. Do I think they deserved it, no, certainly not. I think a life sentence in an Asian jail would have been enough. But they were not nice persons. Even if they started painting and preying after being caught. They changed. How much for the media and how much for themselves, I don't know. They were sentenced to death because they were the ringleaders. The other 7 Australians they had recruited ( Si Yi Chen, Michael Czugaj, Renae Lawrence, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Matthew Norman, Scott Rush, and Martin Stephens ) were sentenced to prison.

Their families are crying, but so are thousands of mothers of heroin addicts.
I have more sympathy for the British grand-mother who did a huge mistake.

And kewtogetin they were not poor teenagers. Sukumaran was born in 1981, so he was 25 in 2006 when he was arrested. Chan was younger, but at 22 he was certainly not a teenager. And considering they recruited others, how can you say they were lured into doing it. They were the ones luring others.

I would say AIBVU in giving wrong facts.

Totally against the death penalty and it does not serve as a deterent, but having seen friends be destroyed by heroin and then had to live in a neighbour full of heroin addicts, I have no sympathy for heroin traffickers, they are callous self-interested people who do a huge amount of harm.

Very interesting to see what future relations between Australia and Indonesia are going to be like. Australia has withdrawn its ambassador today. It is a complex relationship at the best of times based on mutual edginess about the other's intentions and historic turning of blind eyes about Indonesia's appalling behaviour in East Timor and West Papua. Australia is one of the major aid donors to Indonesia.

Yes a firing squad is barbaric, however, it is meant to show other people that this is the reality of what will happen if they get caught. It won't be a few years in prison, it will be years in prison, followed by a terrifying walk through the jungle before being gunned down. If that isn't enough to put most people off then I don't know what is. They were willing to supply drugs that could kill other people and ruin lives all to earn money so they have to pay the punishment.

The murders (and that's what it was, murder) yesterday were utterly barbaric and senseless.

Totally opposed to the death penalty,. As others have already said, how can we say killing is wrong so we're going to um... kill you?

I also can't get my head round the inevitable ritualistic aspect to an execution. If any killer 'prepared' their victim for death in that way we'd probably call it psychotic. We shouldn't be asking one human being to do this to another - irrespective of what they've done.

The death penalty isn't a deterrent, scrambled. So that reasoning is no justification.

Yes Floisme! March them out to a killing field at midnight...tie them to a post...ready, aim...

God it's horrible.

Yes, it's horrible - as is the destruction wreaked on communities and individuals by drug traffickers. We can debate the DP til the cows come home, but until such time as it's abolished it's worth remembering that if you're going to smuggle drugs into those countries there is a severe consequence - it's not as if that consequence is kept secret in any way.

I couldn't be more strongly against the death penalty. As a criminal lawyer in the UK, the thought of it being reintroduced here, particularly with all the current problems in our justice system, makes me go cold. I once worked with an older lawyer whose old pupil master had seen one of his clients executed, and thought there was a chance he had been innocent. It apparently completely destroyed him.

The whole process is horrific and grisly and theatrical and it makes me feel sick. I have the utmost sympathy for the families, and I can't imagine what the men went through, knowing what awaited them.

However, I am uncomfortable with the way the whole thing is being presented in the press. The two Australian men seem to be being held up as some sort of heroes or martyrs. They orchestrated drug-smuggling. They were involved in a trade that wrecks lives and taints communities. I struggle with why they are being presented as anything other than people who did something very wrong, but who should not be executed because no-one should be executed.

As a society we do seem to react differently to executions in that part of the world. I don't know why. Maybe we can square executions of murderers in the US with our consciences better then we can the more abstract crime of smuggling drugs, where the possible lethal effects are further removed from the criminals' actions. I don't know.

I wish this hadn't happened, but I also wish the reporting had been a bit more honest and nuanced than 'evil regime killing our poor boys.'

For me an essential point is that the death penalty is an absolute wrong - whatever the crime, whatever the state of the person condemned. It's just as wrong for the state to kill somebody who is totally unrepentant as it is to kill somebody who has been rehabilitated. I suppose it's more obvious though how brutal and pointless it is as a measure of justice when executing men like this, who have made good use of their time in prison and are changed by it. And that's why people will now be talking about their many good qualities.
They don't need to be heroes or anything else. They were simply human and what happened to them yesterday was wrong.

They weren't trying to smuggle drugs into Indonesia, just for the record. The drugs had been brought in by a Thai supplier, and were being smuggled out of Indonesia to Australia by the Bali 9.

I lived in Bali for several months and it's something of a miracle I didn't become a drug addict! You can literally buy anything, anywhere, it's endemic.

Which presumably is why they are trying to stop it Kewgotin. I disagree with the death penalty, but in Indonesian law a crime was committed, they were found guilty and those are the consequences.

Again, yes to everything that kungfupanda and NorthernLurker have said.

I don't agree with the death penalty, for anyone, in any country, for any reason. It is barbaric and pointless.

The fact that a country enshrines something in its laws, especially something as huge and irreversible as the death penalty, does not automatically make it reasonable or right. I think it's a morally repugnant law (and so does the UN, btw).

The reason this has received a lot of attention in Australia is because Chan and Sukumaran are our citizens. Of course our government is going to try and intervene on their behalf, because it is part of their remit to advocate on behalf of our citizens overseas. It doesn't mean that nobody cares about non-Australians being put to death.

Yes, I feel terribly sorry for the families of people destroyed by drugs. And the families of the victims of murderers on death row in America, and so on. Of course I do. But two wrongs don't make a right.

For the state to murder a murderer is obscene.

They had rehabilitated themselves in Kerobokan. It's a hellish prison and they rose above that and became good men.

If they had been executed ten years ago or if they had remained the men they were when they committed the crime, that's a different story altogether but if you believe in redemption, they lived it.

I'm also disgusted at the role of the Australian federal police in this. They were tipped off by a family friend of Rush so they were to be picked up on Australian soil and prevent the import of the drugs into Australia. To let the Indonesian police know so they were arrested on Indonesian soil is barbaric.

I'm absolutely opposed to the death penalty. This case is hideous and won't change the longterm outcomes of drug trafficking in Indonesia.

And I am praying that Veloso is saved

I lived in Bali for several months and it's something of a miracle I didn't become a drug addict! You can literally buy anything, anywhere, it's endemic.

That is ridiculous and offensive, and totally untrue.

I lived in Bali for a year, and have been there on holiday 8-10 times. You absolutely cannot buy drugs everywhere. Bali is not crawling with drug addicts. Most Balinese people are devout Hindus, especially out in the rural areas. If you tried to buy heroin on the back roads of Tabanan, they'd look at you as if you had two heads.

For me an essential point is that the death penalty is an absolute wrong - whatever the crime

This. 1,000 times. It's the only way to reject capital punishment.

Every time someone says they don't agree with capital punishment "because they might get the wrong person", I feel a tiny chill. Because - as this very thread shows there's always someone in the bushes to pop up with some nonsense term (currently "DNA" seems the magic word) to imply that todays justice is perfect.

The problem is, practically the first act any totalitarian regime is to - wait for it - suddenly discover that their "justice" is perfect. So executing people is OK now. And you don't need appeal courts, if you've got perfect justice. Just a "peoples court"

If the circumstances were to ever arise that I was required to serve on a jury where there was a possibility of a death sentence, I would vote not guilty on principle. (As did my forbears in the 40s, 50s and 60s thus beginning the process of abolition in this country.).

I have trouble with the killing of these people being described as murder. Murder is the illegal killing of people - but the death penalty is legal killing, because it is part of the law of that land. So it isn't really murder, is it.

I'm against the death penalty.

And yet...well, that Australian (I think) recently convicted or charged or whatever with child torture? I wouldn't care if he died. Not at all.

People who support the death penalty as a deterrent always forget that people like the Moors murderers were operating at a time when the death penalty was in force here. It just isn't a deterrent because people think they won't get caught.

But, whether it is or not, it is, quite simply, wrong. We cannot as a society say that it is wrong to kill and then kill people in the name of society. Semantic nonsense like "It's not really murder" doesn't change that cold, hard fact.

Yes nickers. The death penalty is illegal in my state and has been for a century at least. I would never vote to bring it back.

But that man, having (accidentally) read what he did...I don't know. My first base instinct is to wish him nothing but terror and pain because that is what he gave little children. Babies even.

Anyway. That's neither here nor there in this particular case, but it does make my feelings on DP somewhat murky.

With regard to their rehabilitation, you can almost write the script - prisoner on death row becomes a committed Christian (or other religion), becomes a counselor, prison reformer, whatever. They all do it.

If these men hadn't been caught, would they be a pastor and a painter now? Or would they be living the high life off the proceeds of their smuggling activities with no remorse?

I don't agree with the death penalty. But I'm unhappy with these men being painted as martyrs.

I am against the death penalty except if someone touches my boys.
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Or my nieces.
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or horrible crimes.
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What about Mengele? Wouldn't he have deserved it?
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Or Dutroux and his wife, abusing and killing more than 7 girls. The wife is out of prison by the way. And she let the girls starve to death. I grew up looking at the pictures of the missing girls on the milk cartons. I will never forget these milk cartons.
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And more recently, Breivik, chasing and killing all these young people on Utoya. He received 21 years, the maximum possible penalty, so in 2033, at 53, he will be a free man. Is that fair? What if it was your daughter shot in the face.

I think death penalty is not an easy debate. I am against, I would not vote to reintroduce it, but ... there are many buts.