What a dork.

"And who knows what impact our seemingly mundane and meaningless lives..."

Your life Courtney.

Very introspective Sophie, very introspective! However, judge not if you would not be judged.

You don't want our soldiers to die in Iraq? Well given the job description may include giving all for your country and service, where would you like them to die?

And if the all too predictable answer is nowhere, why have an army or defense force at all?

And if you don't want guys to be executed for trafficking commercial quantities of illicit drugs through Indonesia; guys, don't traffic illicit drugs through Indonesia!

One can only imagine the predicament and pickle most Ukrainians would be in now, if they didn't have a dedicated defense force keeping the much more powerful Russian wolf from their doorstep, with some of them now laying their lives on the line without recompense or pay packet; and with most volunteering once hostilities had commenced.

And if ISIL is not prevented from gaining a foothold and an economic presence in Iraq!?

The world could very well be thrust into a much bigger war that could last for as long as a hundred years!

And given the implications for us, it is our battle.

However don't you fret Sophie, nobody is ever going to ask passives like you to actually serve, when there are still true patriots willing to risk all to protect you and yours!

Perhaps when you finally cotton on to the notion of service Sophie, your obviously boring, meaningless and mundane life, will once again be worth living?
Rhrosty.

far more lives will be lost in mothers womb. These young ones will be robbed of their lives.

Courtney,
We all judge ourselves and other people - and all the time.
Here is my judgment on capital punishment :-
The State does not have the right to take a life other than from a person who has deliberately taken the life of another. Take a life and forfeit the right to decide if you should continue yours.
The decision to execute is too important to be decided by a single judge or be bound by precedent. It should be the task of a 12 person jury, not bound by precedent but by the jury's own innate sense of right and wrong.
I would be quite happy to pull the lever that dropped some people through the floor of a scaffold- e.g.Mons or those savages who raped Anita Cobby and held her head under water until she drowned.
Do you think those people have the right to be fed, sheltered and guarded for years or all their lives at the cost of the taxpayer?
I do not.
Conversely I do not a jury would execute a battered wife who killed that bastard who was beating her.
That is my judgment and I am quite willing to live with it and, if I commit murder to die by it.
Some lives are not worth living anyway.

Mother or Father nature in all its fury can kill thousands in one sweep, we are no more than ants in its path of destruction, no use praying to a God when it makes up its mind to strike.
We must remember with the two drug mules that if saved from execution, they like Scahapelle Corby will be overnight millionaires with the media clamouring for their stories, this is wrong, crime does pay, personally I am sick to death of our Federal Government offering hand outs to Indonesia to keep them alive, they are druggies, money was more important to them than their lives, do you want your taxes to be paid annually to Indonesia to keep them in jail at our expense (Julie Bishop) to save their necks.

"like most Australians, I am implacably opposed to the death penalty." and yet as far as I'm aware most Australians are not implacably opposed to the death penalty.

The content of surveys can be manipulated by the way questions are asked and who is asked but my impression is that that the issue is a lot less clear cut.

http://apo.org.au/commentary/legal-silence-surrounding-death-penalty

As a general preference I'm not wanting the death penalty back (but would happily make some exceptions). Mostly I just don't trust government or our legal system enough to think the benefits outweigh the risks. That does not make me implacably opposed to the death penalty.

So just where does the claim that most Australians are implacably opposed to the death penalty come from?

R0bert

How rude some people are by calling the author by another name.
How about an article written by you nameless people that we could all judge?

Sophie, I liked your thoughtful article.
I think most people have opinions about the Bali men on death row, but I can't imagine how many would think that something positive could come out of their execution.

My personal opinion of their supposedly saintly 10 years in the Bali Jail so far is that most people seem to 'find' a god or two suddenly, if they thought that becoming a pastor may save them from the firing squad.
Or maybe they might suddenly develop a talent at painting, and then try to 'save' other inmates by teaching them to paint.

I don't blame them, I would consider becoming a nun if I could avoid a firing squad.

At the end of the day, I don't agree with killing others to atone for them murdering someone else, let alone for smuggling drugs.
That sort of law sends mixed messages to society.

As for the war in Iraq against the ISIL militants, I would understand it more if our Government sent our army to assist those people in Africa who are tormented by Muslim extremists too, but they don't......because there is no oil in Africa.

Maybe I am just a cynic.....

You make my stomach turn, unworthy is the weakness of mind who would vouchsafe such moral relativism.

.

Dear Sophie (the author),

.

You wrote :

« Like most Australians, I am implacably opposed to the death penalty »

You did not indicate your source on that, Sophie. “ Most Australians” may not be quite so “implacably opposed to the death penalty” as you seem to imagine.

According to an Australian SMS Morgan poll, when asked "If a person is convicted of a terrorist act in Australia which kills someone, should the penalty be death?" 52.5% of respondents favoured use of the death penalty in such cases while 47.5% did not favour its use. (Roy Morgan Research, September 19, 2014).

As regards Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, neither could possibly have ignored that he was risking his life by drug trafficking in Indonesia. Each clearly accepted to take that risk.

Indonesia is a sovereign country and the world’s largest Islamic democracy. Australian law does not apply in Indonesia. It is Indonesian law which applies.

In the case of the Bali Nine Indonesia has committed no wrong. The Bali Nine are guilty of drug trafficking. That is a wrong. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) committed a wrong in denouncing the Bali Nine to the Indonesian National Police (INP), knowing that the death penalty applies to drug trafficking in Indonesia. That contravenes Australia’s commitment to the abolition of the death penalty.

Instead of denouncing the Bali Nine to the INP, the AFP should have waited for their return to Australia in order to arrest them and have them tried under Australian law.

The AFP has knowingly and deliberately put the life of two Australian citizens in jeopardy. All the wrongdoing is Australian, not Indonesian.

I suggest you read the excellent article on this subject by Ronli Sifris, BA LLB (Hons) (Monash University); LLM (New York University) :

http://flr.law.anu.edu.au/sites/flr.anulaw.anu.edu.au/files/flr/Sifris.pdf

More broadly, Sophie, on the question of life and death, perhaps you might like to read the following article (It opens as a PDF document) :

http://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CC8QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aph.gov.au%2FDocumentStore.ashx%3Fid%3Dc1447c7d-6904-4d9e-a7d6-a67edd6fb115%26subId%3D300148&ei=0fL2VOHGMMrzat25gLgO&usg=AFQjCNGFEgm86rD84Z5IQxCtmCDeD0GZ6g&bvm=bv.87519884,d.d24

.

it seems that this govt is very selective in its morality: it opposes the death penalty, but that doesn't seem to apply to the unborn, so it seems a bit hypocritical of the govt to get on its high horse and start lecturing others about the virtues of non-violence and the use of capital punishment.

Don't want soldiers to die in Iraq, then stop being an enabler of Islamo-Violence to foster a bloated sense of self-worth. Comparing them with the death sentence of two drug king-pins is is a very low, confused version "O makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep".

Most soldiers know exactly why they are there, the reason is simple as they do not have the mental incapacity induced by getting a Bugger All of some "... Studies" course. Admittedly I cannot directly comment on the latest generation of Diggers but can on earlier.