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Mon 11 Nov 2009Arguments against death penalty continue to be persuasive
OPINION:The experiences of countries which retain capital punishment do not support its use, writes IAN O'DONNELL
THE FORMER president of the High Court, Mr Justice Richard Johnson, has called for the ban on capital punishment to be revisited. His argument is that Ireland has become an increasingly brutish place where lethal violence has lost its power to shock. This coarsening of society is related to the disappearance of the gallows, the suggestion being that the possibility of execution deterred criminals and thereby suppressed the level of serious crime.
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