How can we have this outpouring of compassion for the perpetrator, and simply forget the victim?Midchuck - I think if you click on the link and read the piece by Steve Earle, you'll see that the victims are not brushed aside.

And Hobie, for me, and I think most people who are against judicial killings, the fundamental reason is that these killings "violate the world". To take a human being, to strap them onto a cross, and pump poison into their veins, in cold blood and years after they have done something which may be as horrible in its way as that - it is hard to bear thinking about it.

I think that it degrades and corrupts a society to have that going on. I grew up in a country where that was what happened. I can remember the odd kind of unhealthy excitement in school on execution days - though of course we never had as many of these as you do in America, maybe thaty kind of things wears off if you do it often enough.

And now I live in the same country, and that can no longer happen, and never will again, in a continent wherer that no longer happens and never will again.

There are a lot of things wrong with England and a lot of things wrong in Europe but that's one thing that is right, and thank God for it.