Legalised murder by the state can never be justified

THE PENDING (as of time of writing) executions of the two Australian drug smugglers is understandably a hot conversation topic. On the one hand are the arguments for and against capital punishment on principle - how justified the state is in assuming the right to impose the ultimate sanction. There are as many differing opinions here, entailing all manner of religio-philosophical standpoints, as there are shades of grey.

But for those on the "pro" side, their advocacy generally fall into two categories: "It's what they deserve" (some particularly heinous crime) or "They knew the rules" (they knew the risk and wilfully took the chance). With the former, however, the notion of what constitutes heinous crime is sited on notoriously shifting sands, whereby the benchmarks can move significantly from decade to decade. Within the so-called Western tradition, it wasn't all that long ago the neck got stretched for pinching a leg of lamb.

And within the present top executing nations, such as Saudi Arabia and China, there seems to be bewilderingly long lists of crimes considered sufficiently heinous to "deserve" termination with extreme prejudice. In Saudi Arabia, a false prophecy can put you up for the chop. China, too much funny money salted away in Howick houses and it's the silver bullet. Nevertheless, the argument is that, within individual countries, citizens should know which from what.

"Knowing the rules" can be dubious territory also. On one level, a person may "know" them but, in the heat of the moment, this knowledge goes straight out the window, along with any deterrent value. Many studies have shown that possible repercussions were the last thing on the perpetrators' minds at the time. Not forgetting it wasn't so long that, in France, mitigation could be pleaded for a crime of passion committed during the Mistral wind season, on the grounds it messed with people's minds.

Then there's the dickhead factor. When quizzed, one of the condemned Australians said that he was, yeah, sorta aware of the penalty but it just seemed a highly abstract concept obscured by the dollar signs in front of his idiot eyes at the time.

Particularly distasteful too is the time lapse factor after initial sentencing. It's one thing to hustle the felon out the back door for quick dispatch after receiving the judicial thumbs down. It's another matter, though, for the offender to be kept in purgatory - for decades in some cases - while the appeals processes (quite rightly) run their course. The Australians already lengthy incarceration seemed to have turned them into model citizens a million miles away from their former selves. Yet Indonesia is still prepared to take these two outstanding examples of its own rehabilitative powers and even now gun them down in very cool blood.

But perhaps in the cold blood stakes, nothing is more chilling than the prospect that the person being shot, hanged, injected or electrified by state edict is in fact innocent.

Examples abound of subsequent facts showing that the dispatched "criminal" was, actually, just someone like you or me, ripped from their families and whole former lives, and in effect subjected to a state-sanctioned cold-blooded murder. Death row inmates (oddly enough, usually Afro-Americans) in the US are now are now being reprieved on a regular basis through supposedly incriminating initial evidence being invalidated by advanced DNA techniques.

Much is made in certain murder cases that the killing was "cold-blooded". But nothing is more chillingly cold-blooded than judicially sanctioned termination of an innocent person. This is the only argument that needs be made for the abolition of capital punishment across the board - whatever the cost of alternatives. And as long as capital punishment is on the books, entirely innocent people will inevitably be drawn into its diabolical maw.

-Frank Greenall has a master's degree and managed Far North Adult Literacy before moving to Wanganui.