Sir, – May I advance an entirely different view from that of Mary Stewart (Letters, April 21st), who believes that our "compassionate age" ought to bar the death penalty? Although I have long held that the wickedest malefactors should get their just deserts, and not a choice of desserts, I feel Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court, in God's Justice and Ours , countered Ms Stewart's point succinctly when he argued that "the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe and has least support in the church-going United States."
The fact that we do not take the death penalty seriously in Europe as an appropriate expression of the state’s moral outrage for the worst crimes is a reflection of growing indifference (not to say dispassion) towards human life. Yours, etc,
DR SEAN ALEXANDER
SMITH,
Aiken Village,
Sandyford,
Dublin 18