HAVE I GOT NOOSE FOR YOU

His wife kills foxes, he kills Caribbeans.

Rachel Johnson meets a British practitioner

of the death penalty

THE country boils over with grief and rage over the murder of two sunny-faced young girls. The Daily Mail's Mary Kenny calls for the restoration of the death penalty for child-killers. As the debate bubbles away, it seems the perfect moment to draw to public attention the starring role that the British legal profession still plays in sending convicted criminals to their deaths in hotter climes — even though the last person to hang on these shores was, of course, in 1964.

In the days between the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and their discovery, I tracked down, in his Exmoor fastness, the British QC who has helped to hang a score of black murderers in the Caribbean.

'I'm a Sir, by the way,' Tim Cassel tells me, about halfway through our exhilarating gallop over the death penalty, the spinelessness of the Privy Council in not sending enough convicted murderers from our former colonies to the gallows, and the utter sanctimony of the European Union's campaign for the US to unplug the electric chair.

'Oh,' I answer, with a properly awed tone. 'Do you use your title? 'Mercilessly,' he replies.

Sir Timothy Felix Harold Cassel. Bt, QC, and his learned and honourable consort, the fiz.zily glamorous pro-hunting Labour peer Baroness Mallalieu, QC, live up a potholed track on a former sheep farm above the hunting enclave of Exforcl. Their converted farmhouse and barns are of a swankiness rarely seen in these parts. There is a range of off-road vehicles on the scrunchy gravel, which makes my arrival a new experience on Exmoor,

where one gets used to stepping out of cars into Cadbury's Dairy Milk puddles of unfathomable depth.

Sir Tim greets me the way I like best, which is with a bottle of ice-cold champagne. He is very tall and a very young 60, tanned from cycling in France and Chianti, with enviable amounts of white hair and the quality that women adore in men of any age — the old twinkle in the eye.

We go to the window and he shows me the top of my father's farm, and it is all very relaxed and neighbourly — but the blonde Baroness is nowhere to be seen.

'I don't believe in talking about my private life, on the Hello! principle that as soon as one starts talking about it, it falls apart,' he says wisely, as I cast about in vain for signs of riding crops, pink coats and muddy boots.

He plies me with champagne while two dogs pad in and out, the black Labrador a self-licker (repeat offender) and the greyhound an equally recidivist crotch-sniffer.

Sir Tim lists his Chambers as 5, Paper Buildings and he specialises in crime, defamation and licensing. But not a lot of people know that Tim's prosecutorial skills — I can't keep up the Sir Tim business, he's our neighbour — have secured the death penalty for a raft of particularly nasty murderers.

So, if you are director of public prosecutions in a former British colony such as Antigua, Grenada, Trinidad or Barbados; and if you have finally managed to put members of a lethally dangerous gang behind bars on charges of multiple murder and drug running, then Cassel's the chap for you.

Tim secures convictions, and in countries that have a 'savings clause' allowing them to retain the death penalty as the ultimate sanction, this happens to mean that the guilty swing (unless the UK's Privy Council, the final court of appeal for these former colonies, commutes death to life, which it does with what Tim describes as 'disappointing frequency').

The savings clause is a throwback to the days when British law obtained in the colonies and dependent territories. 'It enables people to hang as a consequence for murder, a penalty that the countries' modern constitutions would otherwise forbid as being cruel and unusual punishment.' Tim explains. So while Britain abolished the death penalty in 1964, it still applies in the Caribbean countries that it once governed. The equally anachronistic link to the Privy Council is also retained — which means that our Law Lords get to play Hangman every once in a while.

So, while I am longing to be able to write a knockabout piece about the ideal New Labour couple — she kills foxes; he kills . . . let's not go there — I cannot. Cassel is merely doing his job, and while he says he would just as happily defend black gang members, as many learned Englishmen do, prosecuting on behalf of the state is better business. `You usually get paid on the hangman's side,' he says.

The bulk of our conversation concerns one infamous case in Trinidad, where Cassel was legal counsel for the state. He was hired to convict the utterly terrifying Chadee gang, who all had nicknames like Rambo and Black Chinee, and whose most recent atrocity was to murder a family of four (Dole Chadee's instructions were 'Kill everybody'). The gang also murdered the only and key witness for the prosecution, a former gang member called Clint Huggins, who was then living in a police safe house. His corpse was found in a burnt-out car, This left Cassel without much of a case.

Until, that is, another gang member called Levi Morris turned state witness too. So then Cassel had to get Morris to plead guilty to murder, which meant Morris received the death penalty; but then, in a further twist, Cassel had to secure him a presidential pardon so that Morris could testify against his former colleagues in court. They were all convicted of murder — despite the best efforts of the defence QC, another British barrister called Ronald Thwaites.

After losing a succession of appeals — including one to the Privy Council — the Chadee gang swung in 1998. The judge had to read the sentences, complete with gang nicknames and the spine-chilling words that 'you be taken from this place to a lawful prison; and thence to a place of execution, and that you there suffer death by hanging,' a total of 36 times.

`My left-wing friends ask me how can I possibly go along with it,' Tim relates. 'I say. Easily. I am completely, 100 per cent in favour of the death penalty and I very much regret the day they abolished it in this country.'

But how, I asked, can he reconcile the fact that the UK is part of the EU, which is campaigning like crazy to get America to stop sending folks to Death Row? Tim explains that counsel in this country cannot substitute the law of this country for say, Guyana, in a death-penalty case. 'They have to administer the law as it stands in that jurisdiction,' he says.

'Anyway. the EU is nauseatingly sanctimonious on the death penalty, and I take absolutely no notice of it,' Tim bristles. It kidnaps people like Milosevic and puts them on trial when the result is a foregone conclusion, but it is not prepared to inflict the ultimate punishment on a violent criminal who has been fairly convicted in a court of law. I find the two positions irreconcilable.'

Tim is also pretty incandescent about the 'wishy-washy liberalism' of the Law Lords on the Privy Council, who keep commuting death sentences to life. He tells me that Caribbean countries are getting `very fed up' with the Privy Council, as `everybody is very keen on the death penalty in places where there is a huge amount of violent crime.'

Fascinating as this was, I had to go. I could hear chinking in the kitchen. There were, of course, a hundred questions I had failed to ask. Was he as right-wing as his wife is pro-hunting? Would he feel exactly the same about sending a score of white middle-class mummies to the gallows? Did he sleep soundly in his bed at night? And, of course, would he argue for the death penalty for the murderer(s) of the two girls?

In search of the answers, I looked for Sir Tim and Lady M. at Corner's Cross last week, where I knew they would be prominent at the Exford Show. I even braved the Member's Enclosure, where the cream of Exmoor meets.

But his wife — who was surrounded, as she always seems to be, by a cluster of admirers — told me that Tim was in Bristol, on a case. So I could only leave my questions about life and death and conscience hanging in the high, moorland air.