Sm,—As a new reader to your periodical, I was very
interested to read you agreed that Mrs. Thompson was wrongly hanged.
But, in this case, would you say that the abolition of the death penalty would have in any way helped justice? Mrs. Thompson was found guilty (however wrongly) of the murder of her husband, and death was her sentence. The initial injustice to her was surely her conviction. Does not the fault in our law then lie in the system by which a person is found innocent or guilty—twelve ordinary men 'and women called upon day after day to listen to, sift, and adjudge facts and fallacies before which even the most agile and alert mind would experience a qualm?
If a panel of learned judges can be sum- moned when it is necessary to decide an obscure point of law (as in The Queen against Marcellus Thompson, broadcast la*t night), then I think the same procedure should be pos- ''sible when a person's life is at stake.
After listening to the comments of various women during a recent trial, I was forced to the conclusion that no woman past her first youth who admits in Court to having a lover would ever get a fair trial from the majority of her own sex. Whatever the charge, she would be 'tried' on moral grounds.
Were I on trial for my life, and innocent, I would choose five learned and wise men fitted by years of study and experience both of the innocent and of the guilty to be my judges, rather than the ordinary man in the street, prin- cipally preoccupied, however good his inten- tion, with his own daily troubles and per- plexities.—Yours faithfully,
CAROL WHITEHEAD
7 11 Weak Avenue, Norbury, S.W .16
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