The relics of civilisations past

The state is meant to rehabilitate people, not punish them

It is midnight. Eight men are pulled out of their rooms, bundled into cars and driven out to a waiting boat. They are loaded on, before the boat moves across to a small island. Blindfolded, they are taken to a deserted forest clearing. The men handling them tie their bodies to pillars. Their hands and feet are bound. Their blindfolds are removed — they might as well be — no one can see a thing on this night anyway. One of these men has schizophrenia, but no one has any time, or use, for such information anymore. Ten metres away, in position, lie twelve marksmen in wait, guns in hand. One by one the eight men are paraded out in front of them. A torch is shone on their bodies, illuminating the heart. Minutes later, their lifeless bodies, in white coffins marking their names, are making the opposite journey across the island.

This is not an excerpt from a racy Dan Brown thriller, or the actions of cold-blooded assassins, willing to make every sacrifice of mercy and morals to achieve their ends. These were people assigned by their government to execute these eight men, because a court had decided they no longer possessed their right to life. To kill them in the dead of night, the marksmen and minders were paid a bonus of approximately thirty-five dollars, or less than five dollars per execution.

The recently executed men were arrested in 2005, along with some others, attempting to smuggle various amounts of cocaine into Indonesia. The archipelago has a massive, crippling drug problem

The recently executed men were arrested in 2005, along with some others, attempting to smuggle various amounts of cocaine into Indonesia. The archipelago has a massive, crippling drug problem. A study estimated that 41 people die drug-related deaths in Indonesia every day. The age group most prone to addiction lies in the range between 13 and 25. It is an ugly backdrop to a country that is a popular tourist destination with a burgeoning middle class, reflected in the increase in coffee shops, restaurants and nightclubs by businessmen eager to cater to growing demand for entertainment from home and tourists abroad.

While this underscores the critical need to take strong, decisive action against offenders, the idea that fronting the convicted up to firing squads will solve the problem is myopic, juvenile, and only begins to scratch the surface. Indonesian President Joko Widodo has gained a reputation for being an extremely weak leader with a penchant for being trampled on by the country’s significant trading partners, most notably Australia. Two of the eight killed on Wednesday, Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, were Australian and their government, led by the tireless minister for foreign affairs, Julie Bishop, had left no legal avenues unexplored in an attempt to ensure these two didn’t meet this violent end. The death penalty has widespread support in Indonesia, and Joko Widodo’s refusal to bow to international outrage may well give his approval rating a nudge. A percentage point here, a life ended there. All in a day’s politics, really.

The state exists to rehabilitate people, not to punish. I know the arguments against the death penalty have begun to sound trite by now, but that is because the objections are tenacious, difficult to argue away in dispassionate discourse. That the death penalty isn’t effective is as statistically apparent and widely replicable (and indeed, replicated) as any lesson one could draw from the entirety of the field of crime and ethics. I will not draw attention to specific examples here. Everyone is welcome to look it up, and challenged to refute it.

‘Imagine how the family of the victim feels’, is a popular argument by those in favour. Terrible, there can hardly be a doubt about that. But do we let them sit on a jury and make decisions as to the fate of the accused? No, and that is an implicit admission by our legal system that there is limited confidence on our part that they will be non-partisan in their decision as to a punishment. It is criminal to be insensitive to the pain of a victim’s family, but it is not cruel to notice that, for that very reason, they are not best-equipped to make decisions about the severity and nature of the punishment of the convicted. Otherwise, we may as well do away with courts of law and simply hand murderers over to the relatives of the slain. It speaks well for civil society that it has decided to leave vigilante vengeance and mafia justice in the past.

They were 24 and 21 years old at the time of their crimes, respectively, and like many people that age, they made some profoundly, recklessly stupid and selfish decisions

The tragedy of the Nusa Kambangan executions is that if anyone seemed to be rehabilitated, it was some of these men. Myuran Sukumaran had become an artist while in prison, holding classes for inmates and ensuring prisoners had access to educational materials. Andrew Chan had become an ordained pastor and a teacher. They were 24 and 21 years old at the time of their crimes, respectively, and like many people that age, they made some profoundly, recklessly stupid and selfish decisions. Unlike most, however, they would pay for theirs, over a decade later, with their lives.

That is part of the cruelty of the death penalty. It reduces an individual to the sum of their mistakes. There is no second chance, no recognition of any good they might have done, or have the ability to do in future. That a government elected to make people’s lives better can think of no better way than to take some of them is depressing evidence of its lack of resourcefulness and imagination, at best. The faultless families of these people feel no less devastated than those who have loved ones taken from them by non-state actors.

Gassing people in oxygen-deprived chambers, hanging them by the neck using ropes and trapdoors, injecting lethal doses of poison into bulging veins, firing bullets into hearts and running electric shocks through bodies are unseemly relics of our chequered and ugly past, unworthy of a ride along with us into the 21^stcentury. Myuran Sukumaran and seven others might have been blindfolded on the stroke of midnight, but it is us who continue to live in darkness as long as we derisively scorn the plaintive wails from the glow of civilisation.