Why Indonesia kills - part one

By Lauren Gumbs

“Doubt should always be resolved on the side of life” Ronald Reagan

The Indonesian legal system does not inspire much trust, but it is a system with the power to make life and death decisions.

It is a system that routinely fails its own, plagued by corruption and extra judicial killings.

The justice system does not have the integrity to make general, let alone life and death decisions, yet many Indonesians still support judicially sanctioned executions.

Not only are countries with fewer political rights, less developed economies and lower literacy rates more likely to have the death penalty, but countries that convict and lock up more criminals are also more likely to kill them.

Indonesia has vastly overcrowded prisons and despite the advent of democracy, access to civil and political rights is often insecure and there is little recourse for those dealt with unfairly.

Research has found that religious and political systems are a significant factor in whether a country employs the death penalty or has moved away from it.

Law and order in countries with the death penalty are more punitive and less likely to see reform as the main objective to serving time.

In Indonesia prison is punitive, it is meant for punishment not change.

It is a means to purge the unwanted in society.

That is one of the reasons why it was difficult to use Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran’s reform in the legal team’s appeals for clemency.

In Indonesia the idea that morally ‘stained’ convicts could reform to an extent that they become useful and valued again in society has not made its way into solid legal defences.

It meant virtually nothing that two narcotics convicts were able to reform, even when the odds were so stacked against them in Indonesia’s notorious drug riddled jails.

In fact the courts seemed almost unconvinced that they had indeed reformed and that it was possible to remove the stain of their crimes and at each appeal the death sentence was upheld.

Even the president did not bother to consider their individual cases for clemency and was unconcerned in taking evidence of reform into account.

If the death penalty is a product of Indonesia’s political and legal systems, how was this shaped and is there a possibility of change?

More to come next week…