I understand what Susan means when she says she is a death penalty understander. I would unquestionably kill, if it was within my power, any person that I knew was about to kill a child.

I am not a liberal politically, nor am I a pacifist. I have been a commissioned officer for nineteen years. I have handled weapons, and I have some training in using them for their intended purpose, to kill people.

I am also irrevocably opposed to the death penalty, even for creatures like McVeigh. It is a understandable, but dangerous, argument to liken the death penalty to self-defense. If someone is attacking a person under my protection I will fight back, and kill if I believe that is necessary. So would Ewan MacColl, I believe. He served in the British Army during the war. He fought because it was necessary.

The death penalty is not self-defence. It is not the act of a parent who kills to protect her child. Like everything else in criminal law, it is a political decision, an expression of our collective will. I am a lawyer now, and for the past three years have been spending my time defending soldiers at courts martial as a military defence counsel. I know from personal experience, what I merely understood intellectually before, that the innocent are sometimes convicted, and that those who may be guilty are sometimes convicted without proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It is not possible to separate the McVeighs of this world from the common run of convicted criminals, all of whom (in democratic countries at any rate)were found guilty beyond reasonable doubt in public trials in accordance with the law. It is not possible to conduct a criminal trial on the standard of proving the accused's guilt beyond any doubt at all. Sometimes there truly is no doubt whatsoever as to the accused's guilt. McVeigh is a case in point. However, you cannot run a trial that way. The best we can do is to try like hell to get it right, which we do - most of the time.

I feel no emotional pain about McVeigh's impending death. I resent the fact that I have to share my oxygen with Charles Manson. I am simply not willing to kill people like Timothy John Evans, God rest his soul, for the pleasure of ridding the earth of monsters.

Edmund Thomas