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Sir: Your ' Notebook ' (March 17), makes out a good case for the return of capital punishment — or, rather, for its re-legalisation, since we should always hope for its nonrequirement — in respect of the particular crimes, at least, that your Notebook mentioned. It also
occurs to me that to have abolished capital punishment even for the most hideous murder and now to be moving legislatively towards euthanasia is just about the lowest form of social hypocrisy there could be. One asks: if it is wrong to execute a cold-blooded, pathological murderer how will it be right to execute a person for being lawfully infirm, or for being aged, or allegedly useless? For that is what euthanasia will be extended to once it gets authorised for mercy-killing: the word mercy will be mercilessly absurd. Such extension has already been advocated. Or, it seems to me, that if euthanasia can be called mercykilling, there is a strong castthat some capital punishment could be called the same: merciful for society and even for the murderer. Pain-killing is what should be allowed — as far as non-lethal treatment can do it. And it can do it more and more these days. And, 'on the point of death' has so often proved to be such a long point that a patient may well still have moments of relief, of pleasure and even of usefulness during one. But moments of relief, of pleasure and of usefulness are the most most of us get in a lifetime. Yes, I have seen cases of congenital, complete and frightening near-total physico-mental incapacity. As a former official of the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children I was once taken round a ward containing many of them. One was a hugely hydrocephalic boy who had been alive (or ' alive' as the sentimentalist might put it) for fourteen years but never more than lying on his back, still. But he could open his (clear and lovely) eyes and smile. This he did frequently, whenever his nurse came to him. And she rejoiced in it. Why put an end to that?
Thomas W. Gadd Alexandra Court, Woodborough Road, Nottingham
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