In The News - 30 October

The decision was handed down by the Constitutional Court today. The mood was tentatively hopeful but that was quickly dashed at the beginning of the hearing. The Court immediately rejected the grounds of appeal for the three Australians, stating that foreigners could not enact provisions of the Indonesian Constitution.

This wasn't a killing blow, however, and there was still hope that the appeal would be carried by the two Indonesian women joined to the appeal.

A few hours later the judges handed down their final decision. It wasn't what I was hoping for and it was nothing short of disappointing and at best it wasn't crushing. It was ruled the right to life made out in the Constitution was not absolute and would bend under considerations of the damage done to their society by drugs. The decision was split 6-3.

That's where there is perhaps the greatest progress to come from the case. 1/3 of the bench in favour of the proposition is certainly more than just a modest amount of support. Also, there was a recommendation by a majority of the judges to create a 10 year probation of good behaviour. Julian McMahon summarised it as:

"Instead of just going out and pursuing the death penalty they are really saying... we hope that in the future the law can be changed and that there can be a 10-year probation period so that if after 10 years you've reformed, then your penalty can be reduced to a 20-year penalty,"

At first I thought this would be a strange outcome and I still don't quite understand the intricacies of it. Will it mean that lawyers will have to do everything in their power to keep their client alive for 10 years? Wouldn't this encourage time wasting and vexatious appeals? I'm not too sure, but it's certainly encouraging and shows that they are very focused on some sort of law reform in the area. And like a friend of mine said earlier, you can't change a country's values over night.

The next step is to follow on with the planned Judicial Review, albeit without the support of the majority of the Constitutional Court. This will be an incredibly challenging stage as it will essentially involve asking the Court to reconsider their previous decision, however thie time it is done with not only three justices' minority support, but also an Indonesia with a less dogmatic Attorney-General and 2 years of political and social change.

There is currently another appeal taking place for some others of the Bali 9 on death row through Judicial Review. The outcome of that case will be crucial in determining the success for Sukumaran, Chan and Rush.

Hopefully after the election, when there is a less pressure to say what everyone wants to hear, the Australian Government will be able to form a consistent approach in support of the Bali 9. On that note, the executions of the Bali Bombers seems to be imminent. If it occurs before the election you can be sure it will be twisted every which way for political purposes and so I really hope that there is as little conditional support for their executions as possible. Ideally there could be some really strong resistance by the Australian Government, even if just to tell them that we do not support their executions. Whatever happens it will have massive consequences for Australians on death row in Indonesia.

"I can't help that, I can't help that"

So it's all over the news in Australia at the moment, the death penalty. The Attorney General in Jakarta has softened on the issue and has agreed to enforce whatever verdict the Constitutional Court of Indonesia hand down. This could mean, at best, that the the Indonesian Constitutional right to life, Undang-Undang Dasar cl. 28 (i), will be upheld and applied to not only citizens but foreign nationals and that it will apply retrospectively. I have been saying for months to keep your eye out for this decision, and the lawyers are telling me that it should come any minute now, but no one can really say exactly when it will come.

This entire issue comes at a painful time for many Australians with the anniversary of the bombings. Perhaps with the assurances of the Attorney General in Jakarta that the Bali bombers will not be executed soon will mean that some respite on the issue can be given to those in mourning. When both political parties are fighting tooth and nail for this next election it perhaps isn't helpful that the issue is being thrown around carelessly, both by Howard and Rudd. I think it was a real fear amongst like-minded abolitionists that the Bali bombers would be executed on the 12 October as a symbolic act of retribution.

However, don't let me tell you that this isn't something that needs to be discussed urgently. If the Indonesian government is showing signs of slowing then we should re-double our efforts.

___________________________________________________________________________

Beyond the political issues that are at hand, I found something incredibly touching and honest in a statement to The Age from, Dave Byron, the father of one of the victims of the Bali bombings, Chloe Byron. To have lost his 15 year old daughter must have been no doubt traumatising and it is tragic to see that he still suffers so greatly from the scars of his loss. He is calling for the death of the Bali bombers to "protect" his daughter and he is also asking for political rhetoric on the issue to stop.

This really struck me though...

"Realistically, for me, it is just vengeance and vengeance isn't good, but I can't help that, I can't help that."

The victims of capital punishment don't stop at the death of the condemned. The family and friends of the condemned suffer for the rest of their lives from images of the execution and the loss of their loved one. It must be unbearably traumatic to watch a State slowly and systematically put a loved one to death. The prison wardens are put in a situation where they witness death every week. And finally, the other side of the spectrum, the families of the victims who are left to indulge their urge for revenge in the blood of the condemned.

There is book I read a year ago called "Don't Kill In Our Names" which examines personal stories of loss at the hands of a criminal which ultimately ending in forgiveness, sometimes after their execution and sometimes before. The book depicts some incredibly difficult and moving journeys towards ultimately quelling the urge for revenge. One quote from the book is particularly applicable,

"To say that vengeance and closure can exist together is a contradiction... the other side of vengeance is anger and as long as we hold onto our anger, our grieving isn't over."

Dave Byron wants to protect the memory of his daughter by exacting revenge on the three murderers who took her away from him. Perhaps we should also try protecting him from something he "can't help".

Quote of the day:

"Revenge is a confession of pain."

-Latin proverb

Values At Any Price

That title doesn't really make sense, but who really cares?

I'm now officially travelling to America for 3 months to do an Internship. I'll be doing a placement as a volunteer with the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans, leaving on 27 November '07. I always thought New Orleans was the capital of Louisiana but I was surprised to find out that it's a city called Baton Rouge. The capital is more industrial and less populated than the Home of Jazz though! I think the center I am working in is on the border of the French Quarter which was saved from Hurricane Katrina because it rests on an elevated part of the land.

I applied for the Internship early this year and went through a huge application process of forms and interviews etc. My final interview was with Richard Bourke and if you remember he was the member from Reprieve who held the lecture on the death penalty at Melbourne University which first got me to really engage with the issue. Richard is quite famous amongst the interns for being able to systematically break you down during the interview process and challenge every reason you have for opposing the death penalty. I haven't met anyone who said their interview with him was a cake walk. Well, he did exactly that to me and I actually came away from the experience quite humbled.

The point he was trying to emphasise to me during the whole interview was that the only thing that separates me from anyone else who supports the death penalty are my values. I'm not answering to some higher moral calling that other people are to simple or too barbaric to understand. Now, that's not to say that I can't believe that the death penalty makes its constituents more brutal and unfeeling, but its an understanding that it does not necessarily make them bad people. And this is something that I realised I had never really considered. By acknowledging that the only difference between myself and a supporter of the death penalty are our values, not some inherent goodness or badness within us as human beings. If I had been born in Houston Texas to a typical family then it is more than likely that I would have been an avid supporter of the death penalty because that is the status quo I have been brought up in.

That sort of understanding and humility when dealing with your own values on any subject is actually something that is incredibly important. You can't win an argument with someone if you treat their standpoint as barbaric and inhuman, and you certainly won't convert them to your opinion. But if you can come to understand that it is something as simple as your values that separates you and that you might just have easily carried their values then you can approach the issue with the sort of humility that you need in a conflict of opinion.

Not only that, but it is also central to the issue of capital punishment and revenge. The systematic demonisation of people on death row is not uncommon at all. By dehumanising the condemned we are able to very simply classify them as unfit to live. Much like Camus' Outsider, if someone flaunts society's most basic standards and mores then they become a "heart that is so empty it threatens to engulf society." And this is where the basic concept of understanding comes into play. Sentencing someone to death shows an inability or unwillingness to understand what drives the person to do what they do, which would in turn require you to acknowledge them as a human. To acknowledge that, however, requires humility because it is in an uncomfortable thought to so closely associate yourself with someone that does not carry your same standards or values. Humility is the ability to admit that you have no right to say whether that persons actions have forfeited their right to life, or that you are any more of a human being than they.

A good example of this can be found in one of the greatest atrocities in human history, the Jewish genocide. Hitler and Himmler were not the men in the field murdering millions of Jews, they simply imparted their views and values on the men and women who would listen. And they did listen, because Hitler was an incredibly captivating and zealous speaker who could rouse crowds of thousands into a frenzy of passion. One of my school teachers was at a Nuremburg Rally and he was so overcome by the mass of people screaming "Zeig Heil" that he couldn't help but do the same through a stream of tears. So the question is, are the police and soldiers who instituted Hitler's Final Solution to the Jewish Question normal human beings? Consider this passage from Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitlers Willing Executioners" that describes the massacre of Jozefow where the victims were taken from the city to the outlying woods and executed one by one to prevent a panic amongst the masses who waited in the town center.

“The walk into the woods afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection. Walking side by side with his victim, he was able to imbue the human form beside him with the projections of his mind. Some of the Germans, of course, had children walking beside them… Did he see a little frail girl, and ask himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being… After the walk… the Germans had to raise his gun to the back of the head, now face down on the ground, that had bobbed along beside him, pull the trigger, and watch… the little girl, twitch and then move no more.”

To understand what could drive human beings to such lengths is a question that is both difficult to tackle and impossible to comprehend fully. Some people would suggest that the soldiers were systematically brutalised to a point that they were inhuman, but I would counter that brutalisation is an incredibly human response to an excess of violence. Much like our ears are able to adapt to frequent loud noises, or our nose is able to stop receiving certain scents, so to is the brain able to adapt to brutality. What could possibly be more human that such a response? If I was a normal German 22 year old in 1942 I have very little doubt that I could have been in a similar position. Most people would like to think they would never be capable of mass murder and given our upbringing and values it is likely we would be incapable. But change the context in which we live and you change our values and thus we are capable of completely different actions.

If you can understand that you are not dissimilar to those that carry different values to yourself then you are far more able to comprehend what drove them to do whatever they did and the beliefs that they held at the time. A quite famous historian, Browning, once said that "Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving". By acknowledging the human elements of any action or belief, rather than labelling it as inhuman, we are able to explain and understand the why and the how, and so we are better able to deal with it in the future. Perhaps if we had acknowledged that normal human beings are capable of genocide the International community would have been quicker to acknowledge it in Rwanda.

So, my hope is that by understanding that what separates me from a supporter of the death penalty in Louisiana is actually very little, I can perhaps present an alternative set of values and put them into practice in a way that will benefit my cause.


Quote of the day:

"We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force."

-Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Welcome!

So, where to begin?

I suppose a welcome is in order, for myself and anyone else reading. I've been intending to start a blog for a long time, but I always felt that they were extremely self involved! But then again, who isn't? So, I've decided to start a blog that focuses less on myself and more on an issue I am quite passionate about, capital punishment.

Maybe a little bit of background about myself and how I came to be involved with this issue. I am a 5th year Law student at Melbourne University. The first time I ever really interacted with the efficacy of the death penalty as a form of punishment was in the 2nd year of my degree. During a class on Criminal Law we had a visit from Richard Bourke, one of the senior fellows for Reprieve Australia.

I suppose at this point I should tell you a little something about Reprieve. They are a pro bono organisation that bring lawyers together from all over the world to fight capital punishment in America. They operate by adopting and conducting the appeals of convicted criminals on death row. These men and women may well be guilty of their crimes, but more often than not are incapable of finding proper representation to fight their sentence through the appropriate appellate courts. Reprieve appeals the cases vigilantly with the ultimate goal being, to lessen the sentence of the condemned. Beyond working within the system, Reprieve is involved in many international extra-legal movements to push for the abolition of capital punishment. Enough about Reprieve and back to my story.

We watched a movie which followed the final month of an African-American man on death row. The appeals, the plea for mercy, the desperation and finally the execution. For some, the saddest point of the movie was the posthumous exoneration which came all too late. For me, however, this seemed to merely compound the injustice of the execution in the first place. Simply watching this movie or listening to Richard Bourke speaking on the topic was not what really forced me to engage with the issue. It was the guy in the back row, just behind me, who raised his hand and asked "But what if they are guilty?"

My reaction to his comment was the impetus that forced me from my inertia on the issue. Being confronted by someone who seemed so blind to the real issues behind what makes capital punishment such a devastating form of justice made me take on an equally absolute, albeit the polar opposite, opinion. I suppose it's just like Newton's laws on motion.

I know this seems like quite a weak and reactionary approach. My Dad always told me as a kid, "Act, don't react." At the time I did react, I formed an opinion on the issue solely because I felt the need to even the imbalance created by his blind and absolute support for the death penalty. That was three years ago. I decided a few years after that moment that it was time to act on my opinions to prove to myself that I could be more than an idle reactionary. Since then my opinions have developed significantly, and I hope they will continue to do so.

So, there you have a brief prelude to what brought me to engage with this topic, but by no means what has brought me to create this blog. I'm sure I'll find the time to write about my involvements up until this point.

I guess I should outline my aims and goals for this blog as well. My beliefs on the issue are quite simple, but at the same time it's an incredibly complicated topic. I believe that capital punishment is absolutely wrong. I know it's dangerous to ever talk in absolutes, and in some ways this often detracts from the point you are trying to make, that's why I aim to be as unbiased and as rational in my posts on this blog as possible. But, like everyone else, I have a strong opinion on the issue which I won't go into details on now. I don't want my posts to be long lectures on what I believe, far from it. My aim is for this blog to not only canvass the many issues that surround the death penalty as a form of punishment, but also to develop my own opinions on the issues and to have a place where I can record this development. I want the way I present the issues to be as clear, concise and approachable as possible. I want to encourage and facilitate thought and constructive discussions on the issue, if it should come to that. My posts will be not only about certain issues concerning capital punishment, but also about any international developments and whatever I may be involved in at any given time, past/present/future.

In the future I would like to get this blog onto it's own domain and open some forums to further facilitate an open discussion, but that is a long way off.

There you have it, a mission statement!

Wish me luck.


Quote of the day:

"It's easy to know what you're against, quite another thing to know what you're for."

- The Wind That Shakes The Barley