IT'S A grim subject but you can't get away from it in America - above all this week while Timothy McVeigh's fate was being decided. We're talking about capital punishment.
In Ireland, the last person to be executed in the Republic was back in May 1954. I can remember the short notice in the newspaper recording that a Limerick man called Manning had been hanged in Mountjoy the previous morning. It was an English hang-man as no local was able, or willing, to do it. In Northern Ireland the last hanging took place in December 1961.
All EU countries have abolished the death penalty. But again I recall the shiver when living in France and reading that two men had been guillotined that morning in the Sante prison just a short distance away. South Africa, where most of the world's judicial executions used to take place, abolished hanging under the new constitution.
Here in the US, the executioners are getting busier as this year looks like having a record number of executions. They are so routine that in some cases news agencies have stopped sending reporters to cover them.
In Huntsville, Texas, there is a veritable killing spree where 21 have died by lethal injection this year, already breaking the state's annual record of 20 set in 1935. This month Texas is working overtime to reduce its 448 inmates on death row at a rate of one every three days.
A Huntsville prison official said: "We're finally ahead of the curve. We're executing them faster than they are coming in."
With the McVeigh trial in the sentencing phase the debate over capital punishment became more intense. While the Catholic bishops' conference called for his life to be spared, they were almost a lone voice. In a recent poll, 67 per cent wanted him executed following his conviction for the Oklahoma bombing where 168 died.
Apart from the Oklahoma bombing, a large majority of the American public is consistently in favour of capital punishment. It seems to be part of the American way of life, if not of the American Dream.
One of the main exhibits in the Washington Newseum on the history of the media which opened recently with the latest hi-tech equipment is, rather incongruously, the electric chair which was used in Sing Sing earlier this century. It illustrates the "scoop" of a reporter who smuggled a camera into the execution of a woman and the pictures are there to prove it.
In the police museum in Miami, one of the largest of its kind in the world, visitors are invited to sit in an electric chair and get their picture taken. While I was there young children were clamouring to do this.
In "Old Sparky", the working electric chair in Florida about 300 miles away, a man died recently with flames shooting out of the mask over his face. A justice official joked that criminals should now be aware that Florida has an electric chair that's not working properly.
The police museum in Miami also has a gas chamber and some stomach-turning descriptions about the agonising deaths it causes. And yes, you can get your picture taken as if it were you.
There is still a working gallows in Delaware although it looks a rather rickety structure.
The clinical nature of execution by lethal injection, now the most common method, has taken much of the horror away from capital punishment. This is believed to be a factor in the continued strong support for the death penalty from people who would otherwise be squeamish.
With lethal injection, the condemned person is first made unconscious with an anaesthetic before the potassium chloride is released from behind a glass screen. Relatives of the victims complain in some cases that the killer had too peaceful a death compared with what their loved ones endured.
But over the past 20 years, in addition to the 246 who died by injection, 131 have been electrocuted, nine died in the gas chamber, three have been hanged and two died by firing squad.
Executions seem to have no effect on the murder rate. Up to now only a small percentage of those sentenced to death are actually executed, but this may change following the speeding up of the appeals procedures which now stretch up to 20 years. You can become an old man on Death Row. If you are black and sentenced to death in a southern state your chances of being executed increase. Across the country, of those on death row, 41 per cent are black although blacks account for only 12 per cent of the population.
There was a widespread feeling that only death would suffice for what Timothy McVeigh had done. Some of the comment was frightening, like the Detroit News columnist who hoped he would catch fire in the chair, writing that "nothing smells better than a well-done mass murderer". McVeigh's execution, however, will be by lethal injection. And it may yet take years of appeals before he gets there.