The Moral Evil of The Death Penalty

Remember me, say Myuran Sukumaran’s paintings done while the 34-year-old has been on death row. As he, Andrew Chan and six other inmates faced an imminent death by firing squad, his distraught family and supporters showed his last self-portraits and protest paintings.

 In his self-portraits, Sukumaran shows the world he is an individual, a complex human being.
 If he is capable of crime , he is also capable of creating sensitive artworks.
 That does not make him more deserving of pity than his fellow prisoners – it is right they all signed his final works – but simply illustrates the moral evil of the death penalty.

does not matter if you think Sukumaran is a good artist. It does not matter his learning to paint is a sign of “rehabilitation” or proof he is a “changed man”. It only matters that, by making his mark in paint, he has created a vivid reminder of the simple fact that real human lives are extinguished by the death penalty. For an individual to kill another individual is a terrible thing. For a government to do it on behalf of society is, if anything, worse. These paintings cry out against a monstrous inhumanity.