An improvement, of sorts

Remember Sayed Pervez Kambaksh? Last year, he was sentenced to death for blasphemy for downloading a paper on the role of women in Islam from the internet and discussing it with his fellow journalism lecturers. Now, that sentence has been commuted to a mere twenty years imprisonment. It's an improvement, I guess, but you still have to ask: what sort of a country hands out twenty-year jail sentences for voicing the "wrong" theological views? And why are putting kiwi lives at risk to defend it?