12 years for murder. 9 years for terrorism. Death penalty for drugs. Welcome to Bali.

This is justice, Bali-style.

Noor Ellis ordered the cold-blooded murder of her husband of 25 years, Australian businessman Robert Ellis.

The Balinese woman was at the couple’s home when the killers she paid grabbed Bob and slit his throat in the kitchen. She and the hitmen wrapped her husband’s lifeless body in plastic, bundled it into a car and then dumped it in a ditch in a rice field.

Yesterday, she learned her fate for this horrendous crime.

See footage of the sentence in this news clip (post continues below):

A Balinese judge sentenced her to 12 years’ jail for brutally ending her husband’s life.

It was a few years less than the term demanded by prosecutors and far less than the price the couple’s children wanted their mother to pay for their father’s brutal murder — a crime that carries a maximum sentence of the death penalty.

Son Peter Ellis is calling for prosecutor’s to appeal the sentence, which he says is a “disgrace”.

He has tweeted about his distress at the sentence:

For a country that still metes out the death penalty and carries out executions, a sentence of death is not such an absurd suggestion for a heartless premeditated murder such as this.

But in Indonesia, it seems that brutally ending another person’s life – or even multiple lives – is not the worst crime on the book.

In April, an American couple also escaped the death penalty for murdering socialite Sheila von Wiese-Mack in a high-end Balinese hotel and stuffing her body into a suitcase.

The victim’s daughter Heather Mack received a 10-year jail term and her boyfriend, Tommy Schaeffer was sentenced to 18 years.

Last year, Bali bomber Muhammad Cholili walked free after serving only nine years of his 18-year sentence. He helped orchestrate terror attacks which killed 20 people.

Yet it was Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran who were executed for their foiled attempt to export drugs from Bali.

They were not murders, they were not terrorists. But, unlike Indonesia’s murderers and terrorists, they are dead.

The death penalty should not be a form of punishment available within the Indonesian justice system, or any justice system, and it certainly should not be handed out willy-nilly.

But it seems a system hell-bent on killing rehabilitated drug offenders, yet letting murderers and terrorists live freely after a meagre stint in jail, does not seem to have much to do with justice at all.

For more, try these articles:

Bali Nine: Myuran Sukumaran remembered at funeral; friends vow to abolish death penalty.

“Both cruel and unnecessary”: Australia reacts to the Bali executions.

Forget what you’ve seen in the movies. This is what the death penalty looks like up close.

Yes, we’re angry. But boycotting Bali will only hurt the innocent.

Do you think 12 years is an appropriate sentence?