kytnism
Bluelight Crew
Execution: Why we find it so terrible
My flesh crawls with revulsion; my stomach heaves. My imagination is on overload. It haunts me. I cannot get the idea of the execution by firing squad of the Bali nine duo Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran out of my mind. I even dream about it at the moment. It hangs over me like a terrible storm cloud. There is a vivid image of bullets tearing into flesh, exploding the beating hearts within. I can hear the gurgling as the still-conscious men painfully drown in their own blood over several interminable minutes.
I even imagine becoming the condemned, counting my final heartbeats, savouring each of my last breaths, experiencing the crystal clarity in my living mind of how infinitely precious life is, as I wait in abject terror for the bullets, or the trapdoor opening and that short fall into eternity as the noose brutally, loudly snaps my neck, or experiencing utter paralysis when my blood catches on fire as the barbiturates kick in, or actually feeling that first huge surge of electricity as I am cooked, flames shooting from my temples, in an electric chair ... it's all very real to me and has been for most of my life.
I have lived through this before: waiting for the execution of Kevin Barlow and and Brian Chambers in 1986 and Van Tuong Nguyen in 2005. It does not get any easier.
Look, I have no truck with drug felons - and I know at least two who are serving lengthy sentences for their crimes right now. These two men have no souls, the pair of them - pure evil. They would kill as quick as look at you. Devils on legs.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are hardly the most appealing of men, either. Faces tell a story: Chan has an off-putting perpetual sneer while Sukumaran looks to be the kind of man not to run into in a back alley on a dark night.
That said, I do not believe they should have to die for their stupidity.
Forty-eight years ago, Australia hanged Ronald Ryan. I have read several accounts from witnesses to his hanging, not least by the illustrious journalists Evan Whitton and Ron Saw and also by Brian Morley of Radio 3AW. Do read these, if you can stomach them. Each powerful account confirms everything I feel about capital punishment. It is abhorrent. It is barbaric. It has no place in our world.
It is no coincidence either that their graphic accounts ultimately led to the abolition of the death penalty in this country even though the intention was clearly to make a law-and-order example of Ryan. The Victorian premier of that time, the redoubtable Henry Bolte, alone could have granted Ryan a reprieve but, because he believed law and order was electorally popular, politics won the day.
Ryan's hanging was a unique, media-witnessed modern day event; the full horror of it played out in newspapers, radio and on television across the nation - and most Australians had no stomach for it. Some 10 years later on the anniversary of Ryan's hanging, I interviewed then Sir Henry Bolte for television on his farm at Bamganie long after his retirement and asked whether he had any regrets about the hanging. He had none. None whatsoever. He was a tough, gruff old bastard, a farmer like many I knew as a kid. In hindsight I failed to ask him a question that I should have: how did it feel to have the power of life or death over another human being?
Fast forward to Tehran, February, 1985. I am in the chambers of two Iranian judges who had presided over the murder trial of a man known as Mustafa the Butcher, which had concluded 11 days earlier. One was the religious judge who ensured that the law of Sharia was correctly applied during proceedings. The other was a judge whose job it was to administer Iran's civilian law. Procedurally, the verdict is not handed down at the end of these trials but given at a later date. I had been given unprecedented access to the trial even to the extent that we were able to move at will around the court and film the whole event, cruel close ups et al of the brutish Mustafa as he struggled to defend himself, drips of sweat or fear falling from the end of his nose. The case against him for murdering his business partner was watertight which was quite unsurprising, given that Mustafa had murdered another man several years before and sent to prison for it although he had been released after the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
"Have you reached a verdict in the trial of the man known as Mustafa the Butcher?" I asked.
"Yes," replied the religious judge with a faintly sweet smile. "He is guilty. He will be hanged."
His words resonate to this day: "He will be hanged." It was made even more chilling by the fact that Mustafa, sitting in his cell out at Evin Prison, had not yet been informed of the verdict nor the fact that he was to be hanged - although I felt he would not be surprised.
I paused a moment and then asked: "How does it feel to have the power of life or death over another human being?"
The religious judge smiled again: "Iran is a beautiful garden. Mustafa is a weed. He must be plucked out."
I learnt that Mustafa would be executed towards the middle of the year; we were due to leave Iran at the end of that month, a fortnight away. Amazingly, I was then offered the opportunity by the judge to film Mustafa's execution if I returned from Australia with my film crew when it took place.
In truth, I would have done it for no other reason than it would send a powerful, confronting anti-capital punishment message out to the world. Personally the idea sickened me; I knew it would affect me for the rest of my life, just as the execution of Ronald Ryan had affected those reporters who witnessed the event.
"We could bring the date forward," offered the kindly judge.
To shorten the life of a man - even a convicted violent murderer - by even a minute merely for the prurient television cameras is something I would never be a party to. Never, ever, ever, never.
"Thank you, but no," I replied.
Now my point: the execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran should be made a media event, not a clandestine act of barbarism hidden away in a jungle at the midnight hour. Bring in the cameras, feed the event to the world and expose it to the light for what it is: a state sanctioned brutal murder of two stupid young men.
Something good might come of that.
Leonard Lee is an author (The Zilch! Factor); an animation screenplay writer (Blinky Bill) and an award-winning documentary maker (A Question of Prejudice) - article source from smh.com.au at 11:15am 4/3/2015
...kytnism...
My flesh crawls with revulsion; my stomach heaves. My imagination is on overload. It haunts me. I cannot get the idea of the execution by firing squad of the Bali nine duo Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran out of my mind. I even dream about it at the moment. It hangs over me like a terrible storm cloud. There is a vivid image of bullets tearing into flesh, exploding the beating hearts within. I can hear the gurgling as the still-conscious men painfully drown in their own blood over several interminable minutes.
I even imagine becoming the condemned, counting my final heartbeats, savouring each of my last breaths, experiencing the crystal clarity in my living mind of how infinitely precious life is, as I wait in abject terror for the bullets, or the trapdoor opening and that short fall into eternity as the noose brutally, loudly snaps my neck, or experiencing utter paralysis when my blood catches on fire as the barbiturates kick in, or actually feeling that first huge surge of electricity as I am cooked, flames shooting from my temples, in an electric chair ... it's all very real to me and has been for most of my life.
I have lived through this before: waiting for the execution of Kevin Barlow and and Brian Chambers in 1986 and Van Tuong Nguyen in 2005. It does not get any easier.
Look, I have no truck with drug felons - and I know at least two who are serving lengthy sentences for their crimes right now. These two men have no souls, the pair of them - pure evil. They would kill as quick as look at you. Devils on legs.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are hardly the most appealing of men, either. Faces tell a story: Chan has an off-putting perpetual sneer while Sukumaran looks to be the kind of man not to run into in a back alley on a dark night.
That said, I do not believe they should have to die for their stupidity.
Forty-eight years ago, Australia hanged Ronald Ryan. I have read several accounts from witnesses to his hanging, not least by the illustrious journalists Evan Whitton and Ron Saw and also by Brian Morley of Radio 3AW. Do read these, if you can stomach them. Each powerful account confirms everything I feel about capital punishment. It is abhorrent. It is barbaric. It has no place in our world.
It is no coincidence either that their graphic accounts ultimately led to the abolition of the death penalty in this country even though the intention was clearly to make a law-and-order example of Ryan. The Victorian premier of that time, the redoubtable Henry Bolte, alone could have granted Ryan a reprieve but, because he believed law and order was electorally popular, politics won the day.
Ryan's hanging was a unique, media-witnessed modern day event; the full horror of it played out in newspapers, radio and on television across the nation - and most Australians had no stomach for it. Some 10 years later on the anniversary of Ryan's hanging, I interviewed then Sir Henry Bolte for television on his farm at Bamganie long after his retirement and asked whether he had any regrets about the hanging. He had none. None whatsoever. He was a tough, gruff old bastard, a farmer like many I knew as a kid. In hindsight I failed to ask him a question that I should have: how did it feel to have the power of life or death over another human being?
Fast forward to Tehran, February, 1985. I am in the chambers of two Iranian judges who had presided over the murder trial of a man known as Mustafa the Butcher, which had concluded 11 days earlier. One was the religious judge who ensured that the law of Sharia was correctly applied during proceedings. The other was a judge whose job it was to administer Iran's civilian law. Procedurally, the verdict is not handed down at the end of these trials but given at a later date. I had been given unprecedented access to the trial even to the extent that we were able to move at will around the court and film the whole event, cruel close ups et al of the brutish Mustafa as he struggled to defend himself, drips of sweat or fear falling from the end of his nose. The case against him for murdering his business partner was watertight which was quite unsurprising, given that Mustafa had murdered another man several years before and sent to prison for it although he had been released after the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
"Have you reached a verdict in the trial of the man known as Mustafa the Butcher?" I asked.
"Yes," replied the religious judge with a faintly sweet smile. "He is guilty. He will be hanged."
His words resonate to this day: "He will be hanged." It was made even more chilling by the fact that Mustafa, sitting in his cell out at Evin Prison, had not yet been informed of the verdict nor the fact that he was to be hanged - although I felt he would not be surprised.
I paused a moment and then asked: "How does it feel to have the power of life or death over another human being?"
The religious judge smiled again: "Iran is a beautiful garden. Mustafa is a weed. He must be plucked out."
I learnt that Mustafa would be executed towards the middle of the year; we were due to leave Iran at the end of that month, a fortnight away. Amazingly, I was then offered the opportunity by the judge to film Mustafa's execution if I returned from Australia with my film crew when it took place.
In truth, I would have done it for no other reason than it would send a powerful, confronting anti-capital punishment message out to the world. Personally the idea sickened me; I knew it would affect me for the rest of my life, just as the execution of Ronald Ryan had affected those reporters who witnessed the event.
"We could bring the date forward," offered the kindly judge.
To shorten the life of a man - even a convicted violent murderer - by even a minute merely for the prurient television cameras is something I would never be a party to. Never, ever, ever, never.
"Thank you, but no," I replied.
Now my point: the execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran should be made a media event, not a clandestine act of barbarism hidden away in a jungle at the midnight hour. Bring in the cameras, feed the event to the world and expose it to the light for what it is: a state sanctioned brutal murder of two stupid young men.
Something good might come of that.
Leonard Lee is an author (The Zilch! Factor); an animation screenplay writer (Blinky Bill) and an award-winning documentary maker (A Question of Prejudice) - article source from smh.com.au at 11:15am 4/3/2015
...kytnism...
