An execution in Indonesia had led to the withdrawal of ambassadors after an international outcry over the treatment of Marco Archer Cardoso Moreira, a Brazilian man who was a paranoid schizophrenic accused of drug dealing. Moreira was reportedly dragged from this cell and denied last rites with a priest. He soiled himself and was quickly hosed down before being thrown in front of a firing squad.
Cilacap priest Father Charles Burrows said that he desperately tried to see Moreira to offer him the comfort of last rites but was denied. The prison says that it was a mix up.
Moreira was executed on January 18th, He was shot by firing squad on Nusakambangan, Indonesia’s execution island. The final moments were described as horrific as he wept and begged for last rites.
Brazil insisted that as a paranoid schizophrenic, Moreira should have been spared. Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff responded to the execution by delaying the acceptance of credentials for Indonesia’s representative.
By the way, while we do not execute people for drug dealing, being a paranoid schizophrenic would not necessarily stop an execution in the United States so long as the person has sufficient mental clarity to understand that they are being executed. Two years ago, the Supreme Court allowed a schizophrenic man to be executed in Florida over international objections. The standard in the U.S. was set in a case involving a paranoid schizophrenic. In Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986), the Supreme Court upheld that states must give competency evaluations to guarantee that the insane are not executed. Alvin Bernard Ford was convicted of murder in 1974 and his mental health deteriorated in prison. He began referring to himself as Pope John Paul III and engaging in delusional conduct. In the later case, Justice Thurgood Marshall ruled that under the Eighth Amendment and standards consistent with “the progress of a maturing society,” there are limits on states in the execution of the mentally ill. The Court held that independent evaluations would be required with procedural protections. Ford was reevaluated and found to be incompetent to be executed.
The Court later ruled in Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), that executing intellectually disabled individuals may also violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments, but left it to states to define what constitutes mental retardation or intellectual disability. Then last year in Hall v. Florida the Court held that a bright-line IQ threshold requirement for determining whether someone has an intellectual disability (formerly mental retardation) is unconstitutional in deciding whether they are eligible for the death penalty. The Court ruled that states must look beyond a simple IQ test to make such judgments.
Source: SMH
Well, finally somebody has the right idea on how to fight an effective war on drugs.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
You mixed up something. Marco Archer Cardoso Moreira was NOT schizophrenic, he was the one of two Brazilians on Indonesian death row who was totally healthy. The name of the schizophrenic Brazilian is Rodrigo Muxfeldt Gularte and he will be executed tonight, together with the 2 Australians and 6 others
The progress of a maturing society. You get that, all you Federalist Society Neoconandertals. Consider the concept. Start with maturity and work your way up to “society”.
po
Religion is now a part of society in the Western World. However, 700 years ago it was pretty much society. The two are intertwined for the most part. Islam is, in a lot of Islamic countries, fairly close to where the West was 700 years ago. A good deal of the posts on this blog illustrate that Islam is society in a good deal of Islamic nations. So, on the evolutionary curve Islamic societies are well behind those of the West. Perhaps this is too simplistic and does not contain other reference points but it pretty much illustrates the situation for me.
Really? I wasn’t aware of it, Nick. Remind me next time I mention it!
You sure I wasn’t referring to you rather than yours?:)
ewwwww
TJustice
I do not have a problem with executing him. He seems competent to deal drugs, he is competent to be executed.
You don’t mean that
Isaac, I read your comment as carefully as I could, as I do all of your comments, and I gave you the benefit of the doubt about your intent. However, I do disagree with you, not because it is about Islam, but because I do not think it is necessarily a religious issue.
My other issue with your comment is your claim that Islam is behind evolutionarily as a society, and though I understand what you are trying to say, I disagree with the premise of comparing a religion to a society.
We can compare, for example, Saudi Arabia to the US, or Iran and France, but we cannot compare Islam, the religion, to Christianity unless Christianity is removed from the society and standing on its own.
And this :” So, though you, Nick got a chubbie at the idea of pointing a finger at islam again, this one is not it. was directed at Nick, not at you.
Pogo
Everything, everywhere and everyone is getting more intolerant, as you have been proving quite effectively.
The fact that Indonesia has been getting more religiously intolerant doesn’t change the fact that it has been, for most of its existence, religiously tolerant. And if we accept that Indonesia has a history of religious tolerance built into its religious practice of Islam, how can we now claim that Islam is the cause of the intolerance?
Indonesia’s islamic practice was sufi by nature, and look up every place around the globe where sufi islam is strong and you’ll see a very religiously tolerant society (look up Senegal with 92% muslim population and its first president being catholic, where women are in the government…).
The change in Indonesia, as you show via your links, is due primarily to an influx of Wahabism, the fundamentalist, extremist form of Islam that is being exported worldwide by Saudi Arabia, and that is underpinning ISL ideologically.
Drugs should be legal, but one does have to wonder what people are thinking when they get caught in places like Indonesia.
see;
Subversion As Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia by Audrey R. Kahin and George McT Kahin 1995
The late, Christopher Hitchens, thought Kissinger should have been tried for murder regarding our involvement in Indonesia.
I stand corrected (Sukarno was overthrown). It was the CIA backed Suharto regime that was in power at that time when Obama was in country with his Father in law.
See http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB242/ for some interesting declassified interests between the USA and Suharto.
Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on the making of his film The Act of Killing
(Indonesia: 1965)
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365340146/
Video: The Act of Killing: Filmmaker Interview | Watch; share….
President Obama spent 4 years (between 8 years old and 12 years old) in this same country with Sukarno in power after the coup. His step father was liason between gulf oil and the Sukarno regime.
A half million people were said to have been slaughtered and the Western media basically didn’t cover it. A recent PBS documentary was based upon the recollections of some of the killing squads. Now how is it that the world is suddenly shocked over one man and why does no one question Obama about his early years there?
I have only one thing to say about Indonesia.
Never go there! Tourist business falls and changes have to be made.
Does anybody know what happened to the girl sentenced to life for drugs in her surfboard cover. She swore it wasn’t her.
What is the role of the internet in a place like Indonesia and Saudi Arabia? Do these two territories shut out other internet access and just have their own Sharia version? Anyone out on our blog know? Is there technology down the road to beat this shield? When the Communists controlled the Soviet Union and all the satellites we were adamant about urging the right to hear Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. Anyone recall those days? If you have a short wave radio in Saudi Arabia and/or Indonesia they cannot blank the short wave stations out very well. Or do they? Anyone on the blog know about this?
We need to flood the pirate territories with news, culture, truth and some naked women now and then.
“In Texas an innocent man is scheduled to be executed soon.”
Suzy
But in the U.S. when basic human rights are violated it is for maintenance of the state, and the need to uphold our great system – you aren’t suppose to talk about the crimes as if they are evil or truly wrong. Our crimes are merely a chilling moment in our nation’s great history.
Capital punishment – I don’t care where in the world it happens – is barbarian and so are the attempts to justify it.
I do not have a problem with executing him. He seems competent to deal drugs, he is competent to be executed.
Mr. Schulte
I guess I shouldn’t wonder why we have a police state in certain communities. Do you think the death penalty for drug dealing is proper?