No Room for Doubt

The day of execution for the two Australian drug smugglers seems to be drawing irreversibly nearer.

I have much ambivalence about the situation.  While, I have no sympathy for the drug smugglers who, likewise, didn't spare a thought over the untold harm they would be spreading by peddling their wares, I am no fan of the death penalty.  There's no room for error with the death penalty; the options to remedy an error are none. And while it can be argued that no errors have been made in this instance, it does appear that the decision is less about dispensing justice and more about projecting a strong image.  People's lives shouldn't simply be being disposed of as part of an image campaign.

But my real sense of disquiet comes from our own Federal police's role.  Rather than arresting the culprits on arrival in Australia, they gave them up in Indonesia, knowing full well that they could be facing the death penalty.  Now, Australia does not extradite people to countries where there is a risk of the death sentence being applied, so why on earth would they give these people up to the same fate.  There has been remarkably little scrutiny of this aspect of the case given the scale of the media coverage but apparently the person(s) concerned have no regrets and would do it again.  People with that kind of certainty in their own convictions always leave me feeling uneasy.