Sir: With regard to capital punishment, Hans Keller (like the
war-time Funf) has spoken (Letter in the Times, March 20). The fatal drawback to it is that, in the context of human fallibility, its use is irreparable. And that "for all but disturbed minds " is the end of the argument.
Minds can be disturbed in more ways than one. It is not alas! too difficult to envisage the following occurrence. A bomb is placed inside .the Royal Festival Hall and timed to go off during a wellattended concert. More than a hundred people are either killed or severely maimed, whereupon the IRA claim responsibility for the outrage and one of their members is arrested and convicted on unimpeachable eye-witness evidence of planting the bomb. Disturbed minds or no, it surely requires a considerable degree of psychosis to see either morality or rationality in confining such a mentally deformed fanatic to several decades of narrow confinement.
The choice before justice in such cases is of course not that between life and death in any real sense, but between quick and slow spiritual extinction. The anticapital punishment brigade are, to give them their just designation, mere fanatical body-preservers.
G. Reichordt 12a Mount Pleasant Road, Poole, Dorset
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