Austailian Andrew Chan, one of the Bali Nine duo, got married Monday at the prison on Death Island.

The ten sitting in isolation cells on Death Island;

• Andrew Chan (Australia)
• Myuran Sukumaran (Australia)
• Serge Atresi Atlaoui (France),
• Rodrigo Gularte (Brazil),
• Silvester Obiekwe Nwaolise (Nigeria)
• Okwudili Oyatanze (Nigeria),
• Martin Anderson alias Belo (Ghana),
• Mary Jane Veloso (Phillipines),
• Raheem Agbaje (Nigeria)
• Zainal Abidin (Indonesia)

Some quotes from the past, taken from this excellent interview with Andrew and Myuran and their families in 2008:

Tolstoy, 1857:

When I saw the head part from the body, and each of them fall separately into a box with a thud, I understood - not in my mind, but with my whole being - that no rational doctrine of progress could justify that act, and that if every man now living in the world, and every man who had lived since the beginning of time, were to maintain, in the name of some theory or other, that this execution was indispensable, I should still know it was not indispensable: that it was wrong.

H.L. Mencken, 1926:

"We hang or electrocute A simply in order to so alarm B that he will not kill C," "The business of deterring others is no more than an afterthought,""The main thing is to destroy the concrete scoundrels whose act has alarmed everyone, and thus made everyone unhappy." It's called revenge, he said, though he preferred to "borrow a better term from the late Aristotle: katharsis" - a "salubrious discharge of emotion" for the whole society.

Camus:

At the moment of execution "society is reduced at one blow to that condition of primitive terror in which nothing can be judged and all equity, all dignity, have vanished ... The sense of powerlessness and solitude of the fettered prisoner, confronted by the public coalition which has willed his death, is in itself an unimaginable punishment."

Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."

More from Albert Camus---"Reflections on the Guillotine, Resistance, Rebellion & Death" (1956).

I have examined the death penalty under each of its 2 aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is (sadly) called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed

William Makepeace Thackeray went to a hanging as a curious observer in 1840.

after seeing the hanging, Thackeray was left with an "extraordinary feeling of terror and shame". "It seems to me," he wrote, "that I have been abetting an act of frightful wickedness and violence, performed by a set of men against one of their fellows; and I pray God that it may soon be out of the power of any man in England to witness such a hideous and degrading sight." Leaving the scene, he concludes: "I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done."

There will come a time when the world looks back on capital punishment as it does today on slavery: how did we ever think that was normal?

George Orwell:

In the 1920s, serving with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, he witnessed a hanging, about which he wrote in 1931.

At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide ...

He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less.

If Indonesia's barbaric laws don't stop their crooked cops from committing the same crimes, how are these laws going to deter anyone? In January, days after the first group of drug offenders were executed, five Indonesian drug cops were busted for their own illegal drug activity. They had thousands of ecstasy pills and meth.

The arrested police were identified as Second brigadier Nurhidayat, First Brigadier Susanto and Second Inspector Sikandar. The private individual was named as Heri Susanto. At the house, it is alleged, the narcotics officers found two grams of methamphetamine, electronic scales and a glass pipe.

The following day the drugs team arrested Second Inspector Andri Agus Krismantoro, a member of the National Police security and intelligence unit. The result of the raid in South Jarkarta, it is alleged, was a total of 15 grams of methamphetamine in nine ziplock bags, along with electronic scales and a bong.

Then came the arrest of Chief Brigadier Sideman of the narcotics unit as he was sitting in a car with thousands of ecstasy pills and hundreds of grams of methamphetamine.

Does anyone think they'll be executed?

Indonesia is a hypocrite. Almost 200 of its own citizens have gotten reprieves for drug smuggling:

The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that 189 Indonesians had their own death sentences commuted in the last three years alone. Some experts estimate there are 360 Indonesians facing the death penalty overseas including vulnerable migrant workers in the Middle East.

The Indonesians who had faced execution but had their death sentences suspended were convicted of crimes including drug smuggling in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, Singapore.

Last year, Indonesia paid $2.1 million in blood money to stop the execution of an Indonesian maid on death row for murder in Saudi Arabia.

Politicians who called for mercy included new Indonesian President Joko Widodo, who has subsequently rejected appeals for clemency for the Bali 9.

Indonesia pays "blood money" to spare its own citizens from being executed in other countries and then has the nerve to tell Tony Abbott to butt out?

At least 18 of the Bali Bombers who killed Indonesian citizens got sentence cuts.

There are beautiful beaches all over the world. Please do not give Bali or Indonesia your tourist dollars or buy goods made there. Try the Seychelles, Mauritius, Fiji or the Maldives. None of those countries execute non-violent drug offenders.

There's something very rotten in the state of Indonesia and it's not Andrew Chan, Myuran Sukumaran and the other drug offenders. It's the Government.