Andrew Chan and Myuran Sakumaran were murdered last night, their long trials and tribulations and their ultimate deaths rippling through the national consciousness and beyond. Yet, despite the well rounded case against the death penalty, the repugnant excuses come rolling in and the obfuscation is blatant.

The excuse most often used for their murders is the fact that as drug smugglers, they knew well the risks involved in their actions. They knew, if caught, they’d likely face a firing squad at some juncture, or at the very least a long time behind Indonesian bars. They knew the law and yet they still went on to commit their apparently grisly crime. Why is it then that we should care at all?

There is a great confusion here, a conflation between righteousness and law. One’s proffering of or rejection to rules is not epistemically dictated by the law itself but rather it being either right or wrong. We do not adhere to the laws against murder because there is a law against murder, we adhere to them because we realise the moral imperative. We object to old, racially inspired laws of exclusion because of a similar moral calculus – the law, the rule, is wrong, immoral, its reasons ultimately false or ill-designed. We should look at the reasons and morals behind laws, not their surface content. Could one honestly imagine defending all laws with the assumption that it simply being a law is good? One needn’t look very far back in history, nor overburden their imagination to see that this is problematic, that this is dangerous.

Likewise, the death penalty is similarly erroneous. The moral and rational calculus simply does not add up.

Merely because these men and the rest of the Bali 9 group (apart from perhaps one) knew what they were doing does in no way suggest that they deserve to die, nor does it present a corollary to suggest we should be complacent. I would not make much of a point here in stressing their rehabilitation and great worth as individuals in the years since their crime, only stressing that it is true and already well argued. They simply learnt their lesson.

More specifically, many are claiming that they somehow contributed to a drug problem that claims many thousands of lives every year and that they should thus be punished not only for its own sake but for the sake of deterrence. There are two great falsehoods here. Firstly, any thinking observer will rightly see that it is the war on the drugs that contributes to the immense suffering and loss of life throughout the world – when prohibition takes effect, crime accelerates, violence rises, addiction inflates, and people are punished rather than treated for drug abuse. It is the punitive system of justice and the illegal status of drugs that kills people. If you’re concerned about the consumption drug abuse causes, be at least serious about it. Secondly, on the point of deterrence, attention only needs to be paid to the history of legal systems worldwide for us to see that the death penalty as a deterrence does not work. It didn’t work in the British legal system, it’s not working in the American, and it never deterred a single crime that we can honestly think of, as if this would even prove the point of success. The Bali 9 crew went there regardless of the threat of death or imprisonment. The war on drugs is useless and the threat of death won’t work, doesn’t work, and never has.

Others object to the attention being paid to the case by way of distraction – with all the misery in the world, with the deaths of many innocents every day, what is the value in paying such attention to this case? Why not concentrate on the real issues? This is fair enough to an extent, and we should all be concerned about other evils and misfortunes. As many as 10,000 people may have died in the recent Napal earthquakes, ISIS still continues to control large swathes of territory in the Middle East enforcing its barbarity, Hong Kong is currently experiencing political repression when it was promised otherwise, Ukraine still suffers from war and Russian usurpation, terrorist networks continue to murder and abduct in more than one African region, then there is the hunger, the thirst, the treatable diseases that go untreated, the premature deaths of many…

This is true. But this point seems to be based on the assumption that we’re incapable, as a global human community, to deal with more than one or two issues at a time, that if we concentrate such energy on capital punishment, we’ll somehow get nowhere on these other terrible afflictions. This is to underestimate the potential for our ability to tackle all of these issues comprehensively. Yes, donate to UNICEF or others working to send aid to devastated Nepal. Yes, be concerned about terrorism and war. Be concerned about preventable disease and hunger. But you should also be concerned about capital punishment.

But this is all missing the point. None of this is about Chan or Sakumaran. It’s about a ghastly institution that this world should be rid of, along with all great affronts to humanity – slavery, torture, and so on. It’s about strong opposition to states and heads of government anywhere having the power to take lives through ‘lawful’ processes. It should be remembered, as has been pointed out, that Widodo is more or less reacting to a vocal consensus on authority, or at the very least a vocal minority, in going through with the executions. Murder has been allowed in part for political gain. Many other populist politicians have acted in similar ways in the past and we should all be equally repulsed.

And yes, we ought to be consistent in our stance. Our biggest ally and close cultural relative murders its own citizens on a regular basis, an unknown number of which may well be innocent – another real danger of such a system, for its abuse and misuse. States around the world still utilising this system should be equally condemned.

It is this power of life and death, it is this system that is a degradation of those facing this cruel punishment, of those inflicting it, and of society as a whole. And more importantly, it represents if not a potential for, then a real degree of despotism – a dangerous road to tyranny. It represents one of the greatest perversions of power still with us.

EDIT: the point regarding other evils of the world that proponents seem to be appealing to – that other innocents die every day and we should care more about these issues – is known as the Fallacy of Relative Privation.