Their stories touched many people - during their 10 years in prison they had turned their lives around, helping other prisoners get off drugs and running prison education classes. So for many it seemed especially cruel to see them plucked off death row to be executed by a new President whose popularity polls were heading south. The suffering of the families was there for all to see.
While many media comments from readers and listeners last week expressed genuine concern, just as frequently they expressed the opposite - variations on the views that those who commit capital offences know the risks so have it coming, or that we must respect not criticise other countries' justice systems.
In Indonesia, the sentiment is largely that this tough punishment is needed to deter serious crime. The only problem is, there's no evidence to say that the death penalty actually deters crime at all, and in fact plenty to say that it doesn't.
The psychology behind deterrent effects is understood to go like this: the severity and certainty of any punishment increase the effectiveness, but the time to carry it out decreases it. In the case of the death penalty the low perception of certainty (of being caught, let alone actually executed) and long time lag completely cancels the brutal severity out. The result: no measurable reduction in crime. One thing you can be certain of though is that with the death penalty you'll kill innocent people. In the United States over 300 people have been exonerated on death row. No one knows for sure how many innocents have been executed; statistically there will be many.
But what it's easy to forget is that most countries practicing the death penalty don't have the legal safeguards that the United States does (flawed as the US system is).
In fact, it's fair to say that in most executing countries, the justice systems are shambolic, corrupt and outright unfair. For the world's big three executioners - China, Iran, Saudi Arabia - "confessions" are regularly extracted by torture and courts are subject to political interference.
But even for people who don't buy the moral arguments against the death penalty, the thing that can't be ignored is the enormous cost.
California's bill to run its capital punishment process works out to a staggering $400 million per execution - as satirist John Oliver pointed out that's more than the entire budget of the Lord of The Rings trilogy.
It's clear that Indonesia has spent many millions - far more than the cost of life imprisonment - on their latest round of executions.
If it were really about stopping crime the money would have been spent on crime prevention or even better policing. All of which is a big part of why the death penalty is on the skids in most parts of the world.
New Zealand has for many years been an outspoken critic of the death penalty - that's been true across successive governments. It has consistently been a sponsor of the anti death-penalty resolution at the United Nations. In fact, while it's had a lower profile here, in some ways our stance has been as much a part of our diplomatic DNA as our nuclear-free policy.
But as New Zealand's economic interests increasingly shift towards Asia, that outspoken stance will inevitably come under more and more pressure.
China, our biggest trading partner, is also the world's biggest executioner. Its bizarre list of capital offences includes counterfeiting, organised prostitution and rioting.
During President Xi's visit last year he signalled that China wanted an extradition treaty with New Zealand so that criminals could be returned to face Chinese justice. Expect more pressure to come on this.
Increasingly it's looking like maintaining our strong public international stance against the death penalty may require the same principled stand that the anti-nuclear policy did in the early days.
When people give me a hard time about Amnesty International's work against the death penalty I tell them that when we started work on it back in the 1970s over 100 countries were still executing. Last year, just 22 countries carried out executions. I am confident that New Zealand is on the right side of history on this issue - that one day the death penalty will be a thing of the past. But once again New Zealand needs to stand firm and hold to its principled stand.
• Grant Bayldon is executive director of Amnesty International New Zealand
