SIR,-1 have never approved of capital punishment. and I deeply
sympathise with the views expressed by Lady Wootton and other of your correspondents. But I do not think that sympathy alone is enough. It can rouse public opinion—as it most certainly did in the case of Ruth Ellis—but for that opinion to become majority opinion and hence effective in the abolition of the death penalty,' I suspect that other tactics are necessary.
In recent months there has been a series of articles in the Sunday Pictorial by a man who was accused of murder, found guilty, and only reprieved after . ninety days in the condemned cell. He is now free. and he has spent his freedom (encouraged by Lord Pakenham) trying to collect the evidence which will establish his original innocence. If he can do this— and the Pictorial suggests that he has gathered the necessary evidence—then surely his case will provide one of the strongest arguments for the abolitionists? For the ultimate argument against hanging must he its finality. What, for instance, would be the effect on public opinion if it was discovered and admitted bY the Government that this innocent man had almost been hanged? Would not this destroy the arrogant myth that 'no innocent man is ever hanged'? And once this myth had been exploded, would not jurors be much more reluctant to sit on juries in cases where a verdict of 'Guilty' might result in a hanging three weeks later?—Yours faithfully, *
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