After the Friday and Saturday funerals for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, it’s timely to remember that principled opposition to capital punishment is only a relatively recent affair in Australia. By no means is it firmly embedded as an aspect of the ‘Down Under Enlightenment’.
In January we had a Morgan poll that showed that 52% of respondents answered “yes” to the question: “In your opinion if an Australian is convicted of drug trafficking in another country and sentenced to death should the penalty be carried out?”
A 2009 poll with a similar question delivered almost the same result: 51% said “yes”.
In this year’s SMS poll of 2,123 people, a larger majority, 62%, said that the government should not do more to stop the executions of Chan and Sukumaran.
It came as a shock, especially as the Indonesian authorities picked up the findings and declared that they were acting in accord with the wishes of most Australians.
These responses depend significantly on the nature of the questions asked – one line “yes” or “no” polls with an unnuanced question are not regarded as a statistically reliable measure of public opinion.
For instance, Australians have been asked in successive polls between 1986 and 2006, “would you be in favour of capital punishment for cases of murder?”
According to David Indermaur of the crime research centre at the University of WA, the “yes” answer peaked in 1993 and since then progressively declined. That downward trend was also found in other English speaking contraries, even in the US – although the level of support there is still high.
In Australia, support for the death penalty for murder fell below 50% for the first time in 2003. However, different questions provoke quite different responses. Research in the US found that if sentences, such as life imprisonment, were posed as an alternative to capital punishment, support for the death penalty dropped by half.
You might get closer to measuring an informed response if a question along the lines suggested by Indermaur is posed:
Consider yourself to be a judge in a case involving murder. You must decide whether the death penalty should be applied to the accused knowing that it is not necessary to achieve any deterrent effect, and that the alternative sentence of life in prison without parole is available. What is your decision?
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph thought it was on a winner shortly after the January Morgan poll when it ran a front page headline in relation to Chan and Sukumaran, which aimed at the heart of the paper’s demographic: “No Sympathy - Their drug operation would have destroyed thousands of lives – now they’ll pay with theirs.”
However, by the time of the execution of the two Australians by Indonesian firing squad, there was no tabloid gloating that they paid the right price.
In fact, The Australian’s media editor Sharri Markson tweeted that the Herald Sun and the Tele brought “the tragic news to readers in 6 and 7am editions today”.
The Herald Sun and The Tele brought the tragic news to readers in 6 and 7am editions today pic.twitter.com/7YtRxbIMJd
— Sharri Markson (@SharriMarkson) April 28, 2015
The popular mood changed as the executions got closer and seemed inevitable.
Much the same thing happened in 2005, when Australian Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged in Singapore. He had been caught at Changi airport with 396 grams of heroin, on his way to Australia. According to Indermaur, his execution “sparked a new urgency to the debate about the morality of the death penalty”.
The Howard government was criticised for not having taken the case to the International Court of Justice, but as with Indonesia there was concern in Canberra that the official protests should not affect the economic relationship. Trade trumps human rights.
Nguyen’s execution took place 38 years after the hanging at Pentridge Gaol in Victoria of Ronald Ryan, who had shot and killed a prison warder while escaping. He was the last person in Australia to be judicially murdered.
This was an extraordinary affair and reflected the divisions in Australian politics and society. The government’s decision not to commute the sentence of death on Ryan was popular generally, particularly among rural communities and workers. It was the “elites” who were united in opposition.
The Victorian media was overwhelmingly against the execution, as were church leaders, the legal profession and academics. 3,000 people gathered in a vigil outside the gaol on the day of Ryan’s hanging. Most of the political class mutely supported Victorian Premier Henry Bolte, who was championing Ryan’s execution.
Bolte saw the protests as a challenge to his authority. “The more the press campaigned, the more the issue was raised as to whom was running the show,” he said. Was it to be the newspapers, the “parsons ... the bullfrogs at the university ... the wharfies”, or the government?
Sir Frank Packer, proprietor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and The Bulletin, was in Bolte’s corner and editorialised in support of Ryan’s execution. An issue of The Bulletin was pulped because it carried an anti-hanging cartoon by Les Tanner.
Bolte must have kept Machiavelli’s advice firmly in mind: “A prince therefore, must not mind incurring the charge of cruelty for the purpose of keeping his subjects united and faithful.”
The political response to Australians being executed is markedly different today that was the case in 1967 and is even stronger now than it was in 2005 when Nguyen Tuong Van was hanged in Singapore.
Overwhelmingly politicians expressed their opposition to the execution of Chan and Sukumaran. That’s not to say they reflect an overwhelmingly popular view.
Agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce told the ABC’s Lateline that many Australians support capital punishment and there needs to be a “discussion” about it.
An earlier study by Jonathan Kelley and John Braithwaite at the research school of social sciences at the ANU found that “elites” led the charge on the abolition of the death penalty. Most states abolished capital publishment between 1955 and 1973, and the Commonwealth in 1976. WA clung on until the mid-1980s.
Judges used to say that the public’s respect for the judiciary fell away after the death penalty was removed from the statute books.
Abolition did not come from popular public opinion, in fact it was in spite of what most of the public thought. The undercurrents remain strong, particularly for terrorist attacks on home soil. If politicians make an exception, and impose capital punishment for terrorist offences, they’ll probably be cheered on with blood-curdling noises from the “non-elites”.
American writer Norman Mailer said the only way to get rid of capital punishment in his country was to put executions on television, so everyone could see what goes on. Only then would the public rise up in protest.
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