Letters: New Forest West MP’s call to bring back the death penalty

IN response to your article (7th Feb) I wholly support Sir Desmond’s call for the re-introduction of the death penalty, but not as a general rule.

For many years in my youth, I supported the death penalty for murder, but after witnessing a number of mistrials over the years where the ‘guilty’ parties had been hanged, evidence was introduced years later to prove their innocence, a travesty of justice that is hard to imagine had occurred. After many years of reflection, I began to waver. As a Christian, I struggled not to return to my thoughts of the past, but there are always exceptions to every rule, and here we have one.

The killings of three young innocent school children in Southport along with the attempted murder of eight other children and two adults, has persuaded me that there are certain situations where the death penalty is more than justified.

I found the comments about an individual’s right to life, regardless of their murderous crimes, to be offensive in the extreme and the fact that that belief is held by Amnesty International makes it even worse because they say, “in every single case” This is followed by a comment from their Naomie McAuliffe. “The death penalty violates the right to life, a fundamental human right, and no government should give itself the right to kill human beings” Sadly she has only to look to Ukraine or Gaza where many innocent lives have been taken.

The only defence I can think of for their comments, is that they have been indoctrinated themselves and to such a degree that they are incapable of clear or compassionate thought. I would also counter with, what about the ‘right to life’ that these youngsters deserved, but have been deliberately taken away by what appears to be another ‘Indoctrinated’ human being. Forgiveness in my book is a finite word. So far, but no further.

So what would be my guidelines? Anyone accused of murder (not manslaughter) would have had to have left ‘an absolutely irrefutable paper trail’ that proved beyond any doubt (not beyond reasonable doubt) that the individual(s) concerned had clear intention that their murderous crime was intentional. The guilty party would be incarcerated for a period of 12 months prior to execution to allow for the possibility of any miscarriage of justice being uncovered. It would also give the guilty party time to reflect on the crime they have committed. This period would be decided by the judge at the conclusion of the trial.

John Walsh

Address supplied

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SIR Desmond Swayne’s comments on the death penalty (A&T 7th Feb) have again focused attention on this issue.

The brutal murders committed by Axel Rudakubana have provoked completely understandable public outrage and a desire for revenge. However as always, the objections to the reintroduction of the death penalty are not just ethical but also practical.

Firstly, there is absolutely no evidence that the existence of the death penalty provides a deterrent to potential killers. In the USA, for example, they gleefully execute murderers by various methods every year, and yet their murder rate per capita is approximately five times as high as the UK’s.

Secondly it is a sad fact that miscarriages of justice sometimes take place. The current controversy over Lucy Letby is a case in point. Although the outcome is currently unknown, if she had been executed for the seven child murders for which she was convicted and the convictions were later been found to be unsafe, it would have been too late. Prisoners can be released; they cannot be un-executed.

Thirdly, and even more fundamentally, how on earth would you recruit the executioners? Advertise in the Jobs section of the A&T? Anyone who actually wants the job is, by definition, a deeply sick individual needing psychological help.

Finally, Sir Desmond contends that the Thirty Nine Articles of Faith of the Church of England, written in 1563, somehow outrank the Ten Commandments. He believes this is the case because the text of the latter has evolved from the original Hebrew into English via Greek and Latin and that in the original it forbade murder, but not judicial killing. This attempts to reduce a moral issue into a semantic one. For 2,300 years it has been generally accepted that God says we should not kill, but Sir Desmond says we can when it suits us. Readers will decide who gets their vote.

Chris Elliott

Lymington

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THE English translation of a passage in Leviticus states: “And a man who injures his countryman – as he has done, so it shall be done to him [namely,] fracture under/for fracture, eye under/for eye, tooth under/for tooth. Just as another person has received injury from him, so it will be given to him.” (Lev. 24:19–21).

Referring to Sir Desmond Swayne’s comment (A&T 7th Feb) to bring back hanging in this recent case of the murder of those three little girls in Southport as “an affront to justice” I can only agree with him.

To put away this evil (I won’t call him a human being) beast after such a heinous crime, and to keep him safe and comfortable and warm in a single cell, with three meals a day, with immediate attention to any demand or wish he makes whether physical or mental, such as free health care or treatment, or to satisfy his own whims and demands for satisfaction and for him to receive it, and paid for throughout all those years by the taxpayers, is certainly far from right.

This person has now gone too far in a human society and should now have to face the consequences of a public hanging.

M Hill

Barton