Life is cheap enough

Albert Pierpoint

I like Richard, we have similar interests. I can always guarantee that if I sit in the pub and talk to him I will end up 1. being pissed, 2. not in any kine of disagreement. I don't need disagreement, I get a full working day of it every working day.

Today was the exception.

I don't recall how we ended up on the subject of capital punishment, but we did. I am opposed to capital punishment and I'm beginning to think that I'm one of few who are. I was quite surprised that Richard is very, very pro-death penalty.

I guess that it was one of those "don't judge a book by its cover" type situations. Just because I'm a dyed in the wool Tory / racist / bigoted bastard, he obviously thought that I was going to be one of the "hang 'em high" brigade. Well, I'm not.

I'm also not one of those who doesn't believe in it because of the "what if you hang the wrong man" argument. Un-bloody-lucky.

It's just wrong. Judicial murder is revenge. Imprisonment is not the same. It's not a deterrent, but it's not revenge either.

I've never been a believer in capital punishment and this was re enforced by my reading of Executioner Pierpoint, the autobiography of Albert Pierpoint, the UK's most prolific hang-man. He followed his Father and his uncle into the "craft" and became super efficient.

In the end, after he had resigned, he came to the belief that for all of the hangings he had carried out, he, or the punishment that he carried out, had served as no deterrent [read it, it's a good book that expresses no moral standpoint, only giving the facts as he saw them].

The one point on which I admired Mr Pierpoint was that he was honest enough to own up if he made a mistake. Our cousins across the water gas, fry, poison and maim their bad-boys and fuck it up on a regular basis but they never admit that they were in the wrong. The first time some yank soldier puts a dog lead around the neck of a goat eater then he / she is branded as a torturer. Hey, uncle Sam, look along your death rows.