It's the kid thing that undoes any liberal feelings with me, I'm afraid.
In theory I'm resolutely opposed to capital punishment - believing that none of us, singly or collectively, has the right to take another person's life, whatever their crime.
In practice I'm a hypocrite.
I recall being in court in Edinburgh some years back when a notorious child killer called Robert Black was being sent down for life after being found guilty of three hideous murders and an abduction that would have ended in murder had he not been caught fleeing the scene with a young girl trussed up in a sleeping bag in the back of his van.
Before sentencing the psychiatric reports were presented to the court, and the gist of them was that such was Black's pathological problem that he could never be given liberty ever again; his compulsion sexually to abuse children and kill them was untreatable and he would forever remain a danger.
I was sitting about five feet behind Black as the details of his crimes and his mental state were being laid out so dispassionatley and so shockingly. He was a shortish, stocky and unprepossessing sort of bloke, with cropped hair and very average looks. But he was very much alive; a living, breathing human being with a mother of his own and, at various stages in his life, women who had found something there to love.
I remember his ears flushing red as details of his psychopathology were read out, and him sighing deeply and audibly when his previous convictions - going back nearly 30 years and ranging from petty thievery to sexual assaults and rapes - were catalogued. For all the enormity of his crimes, Black was a man - mad and bad, but nevertheless a person.
Yet, had someone put a pistol in my hands and asked me to press the muzzle against the back of his neck and pull the trigger, I think I could have done so with few qualms. Subsequently I've often felt ashamed of my own feelings and reaction that day, but I still know that I could have killed him without compunction in the way that one wrings the neck of an animal to put it out of its misery.
So maybe it is for the best that in the UK we've shelved capital punishment - it stops people like me giving in to their more visceral nature.