I suppose this opinion sums up what a lot of peope thought when seeing the trophy pictures splashed across media which reduced us all to ugly spectators.
BEING opposed to the death penalty, in my view, means being opposed to it in all cases.
This is not as easy as it sounds.
In most cases it is enough to see evil killers and their like sentenced to life imprisonment, so long as we know they will never be free.
Too often, however, we know that even the most brutal and heartless murderers can expect to rejoin society.
And over the years I have known relatives of murder victims, people who have had to live with the consequences and loss caused by heinous crimes.
It sometimes seems the very knowledge that the convicted killer of their loved one is still drawing breath, in a prison often in the same city, must be unsettling and unjust.
Sill others live in torment about the day the offender is released.
Yet for all this, my view is that state-sanctioned killing demeans us all.
For some of the very worst monsters โ like the Bali bombers, for instance โ it can even represent an easy way out and a claim to martyrdom.
Whenever I have doubts about my opposition to the death penalty, I think of the mechanics of the process.
Would I be prepared to be the executioner who pulls the trigger or administers a lethal injection?
Could I lead a prisoner to the gallows or strap him or her into an electric chair?
I could not.
And I abhor a system that would ask anyone to do such a thing.
Which brings me to that picture; that inconceivable, sickening and degrading photo of an Indonesian police commissioner, Djoko Hari Utomo, posing with Australiaโs death row prisoners Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
How could a fellow human pose for a trophy photo with men on their way to execution?
To treat someone elseโs fate with such disdain, such macabre novelty, is the ultimate demonstration of how the death penalty diminishes us all.
I donโt want the Australians killed, or the other death row prisoners in that menacing Indonesian island prison, even though I know they put themselves there through equal doses of selfishness and stupidity.
Nor should the Bali bombers have been killed, or Saddam Hussein, or anyone else.
Deprive the very worst of their liberty forever.
But donโt reduce us all to ugly spectators, mocking the very essence of life, like that Indonesian policeman.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/bali-nine-indonesian-police-photo-with-chan-and-s...
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