Brian Deegan, a mag­is­trate in South Australia who lost his son in the October 2002 Sari night­club bomb­ing in Bali, recent­ly stat­ed that he believes the ter­ror­ists who com­mit­ed that crime should not receive the death penal­ty, but should be sen­tenced to a term of life in prison with­out parole. In an opin­ion piece in The Australian, Deegan noted:

The Bali bombers who mur­dered my son last October are evil extrem­ists, but they don’t deserve the death penal­ty.
…
Indeed, I have no prob­lem with the idea that he [Amrozi] and his accom­plices should remain in prison for the rest of their lives. But the prospect of their judi­cial mur­der is some­thing I want no part of.
…
As a mea­sure employed to dis­suade poten­tial crim­i­nals, the death penal­ty has been an abject fail­ure. This is borne out by sta­tis­tics that point to the com­men­su­rate rise of mur­ders and exe­cu­tions in coun­tries where cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is award­ed.

The argu­ment in favour of exe­cu­tions remains dif­fi­cult to rec­on­cile with the uni­ver­sal revul­sion gen­er­at­ed by peri­ods in his­to­ry when soci­ety thought noth­ing of hang­ing a child or burn­ing a witch. We read with dis­gust ? or per­haps with guilt ? of the ston­ing of adul­ter­ers, the removal of a thief’s hand or the decap­i­ta­tion of a blas­phe­mer. Yet we find it palat­able to break a man’s neck, to poi­son his veins or to electrocute him.

The sug­ges­tion that Amrozi and his fel­low evil­do­ers should face an Indonesian fir­ing squad is uncon­scionable because that would make the pun­ish­ment as bar­bar­ic as the crime. What the Bali bombers did to my child and to the hun­dreds of oth­ers defies descrip­tion. But the October 12, 2002, ter­ror­ist attacks do not give any­one the right to repeat such a vile act.

(The Australian, July 9, 2003). See New Voices.

Citation Guide