The quality of mercy
From Mr Peter Weitzman, QC Sir: Neil Clark ('Bring back the rope' 9 June) thinks that 'it is just that convicted murderers should pay with their lives; and second, that the death penalty deters'. Maybe it does deter; but the proposition that 'convicted murderers should pay with their lives' ignores the fact that the crime of murder covers a whole range of circumstances. Murder, to put it broadly, is the doing of an act which causes death with the intention of killing or causing serious bodily harm to the victim; and so includes, at one end of the spectrum, a deliberate gangland massacre, and at the other the reasoned killing of a loved relation who is suffering from unbearable pain in the course of a terminal illness (although the latter case is often reduced to manslaughter by the attribution to the accused of an 'abnormality of mind').
There has been an attempt to distinguish murders which should attract the death penalty from those that should not. The result was absurd. In a short-lived Act in the 1950s, murder 'in furtherance of theft' was categorised as a capital offence. I appeared as junior counsel in a case in which the four accused, who had kicked another boy to death, based their defence on the contention that they had carried out the assault for fun and only as an afterthought had gone through the victim's pockets.
One solution might seem to be to give the judge on whom the task of sentencing falls the discretion to impose the death penalty in appropriate cases. I think it is obvious that this is not a practicable course. Has Mr Clark any alternative suggestion? Would he leave it to the politicians, as was once the position, to exercise the prerogative of mercy?
Peter Weitzman
London W11
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