MY principal reason for opposing a return of capital punishment is the worry that our legal system gets it wrong far too often, or certainly seems to in the light of convictions which are overturned later.

One innocent person executed is one too many to accept, even though there have been many cases where I have felt that a death sentence was appropriate, bearing in mind the violence or scale of the offence.

However, hearing about the execution of Akmal Shaikh for drug smuggling, I couldn’t help thinking that the Chinese, for all their appalling human rights record, have got it closer to justice than our own pathetically lenient sentencing system.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s intervention probably sealed Mr. Shaikh’s fate. It singularly failed to help his cause because the Chinese do not take kindly to external advice. Those who travel to different cultures must learn to play by the rules or take the consequences.

The fact is China takes drug trafficking seriously. A lot more seriously than we do. Drugs cause untold death and misery yet they are freely available in this country and they are daily destroying lives.

I don’t think it behoves our politicians to lecture the Chinese. In the 19th Century we fought opium wars to enable traffickers to sell their noxious substances to millions of Chinese people, so history is hardly our ally.

We may think that modern day China is still living in a repressive past, but it has the spending power so it’s unlikely that protests over this execution will go beyond soon forgotten posturing and empty rhetoric.

Maybe we could take a lesson from China when it comes to sorting out our legal system which is so heaviily skewed towards the interests of even the vilest criminals.

Nobody admits to guilt any more. Diminished responsibility is the new defence of choice for murder. Or some bizarre medical syndrome which robs offenders of their sense of right and wrong. Graham Jones stabbed his wife 96 times and pleaded guilty to manslaughter on diminished responsibility grounds. Jailed for eight years, he’s out on parole half way through the sentence. What message does that send to the victim’s family?

Just who has the diminished responsibility in cases like this? The killer or the courts that once again let us down?

Justice the Chinese way may seem rough. But I have less sympathy for the fate of Akmal Shaikh, who ought to have known the value of the advice “when in China”, than I do for people in this country who are persistently failed by a lamentably weak concept of justice that all too often puts the human rights of criminals foremost.

TWITTER YE NOT!

OKAY, so I might ramble on a bit, but I don’t twitter. Nor do I plan to forsake normal relationships for the dubious joys of a “virtual life”.

Sometimes I wonder if we have lost the arts of conversation and letter writing. Are we really turning into a society that only meets by means of a laptop messageboard or texts?

There are more than 13 million social networkers in the UK. They used to say that television would spell the end of social contact. But now it’s the dreaded computer we can’t live without.

The sad truth is that, for many people, these sites are their only way of communicating. The very idea of a face to face chat scares the pants off them. Sitting down to a meal with friends, or meeting up to go to the cinema or theatre, is anathema to this addictive new way of life.

We may be unconsciously breeding a whole generation of people whose entire existence is played out within sight of a computer screen.

And who said you can’t buy your friends? Well, now you can. Yes, there is one company that will sell you the names of “friends” that you can add to your networking site. It’s a concept I would find repellent, were it not so tragic that some networkers actually have to fill their empty lives with bought semi-anonymous acquaintances.

Escaped prisoner Craig Lynch has not had to buy his 3,800 Internet friends. Serving seven years for burglary with a weapon, he regularly updates his Facebook page by taunting the police. Thousands of morons log on to his page and have turned him into a singularly unworthy cult anti-hero.

Indiscreet Facebook postings are about to find their way into the divorce courts in the United States, while one driver who crashed his car found his own drunken boasting MySpace words coming back to haunt him in evidence.

When people lose their jobs because they have slagged off their bosses and when wives find out about the husbands’ infidelities on-line, it suddenly gets a lot more real than virtual.

These sites are a modern phenomenon, no doubt about that. But they are pushing us further away from basic human contact. Receiving a letter, as long as it wasn’t from the tax office, used to be a huge pleasure. Someone had taken time and trouble. Now a hundred people receive the same lazy tapped out message. Our Prime Minister sets the dubious standard now when it comes to the outdated skill of handwriting.

All this means we are living in a technology bubble that is open to all sorts of abuses. We may think we know our friends, but do we? Social networks? More like anti-social networks if you ask me.

TURNED OFF BY THE LAKES

HAVE we really got to endure another 11 of these programs? That was my initial feeling after watching Rory McGrath’s glorified travelogue The Lakes when it made its bow on ITV on Monday evening.

On the supposition that any publicity is good publicity then you could not take exception to this bland, chocolate box presentation of people working in various industries in this wonderful corner of Great Britain.

It was embarrassingly gooey, starry-eyed stuff with the ubiquitous McGrath, who has been touring Ireland with two blokes for another current series, popping up almost apologetically doing the links between showing viewers what a grand lot we Lakelanders are.

It doesn’t hold a candle to the delicious Julia Bradbury’s Wainwright Walks, the gritty drama of Jimmy McGovern or David Dimbleby’s informative dip into the Lake District on his Picture of Britain tour. I can’t believe they have given this prime time. Please let it get better, otherwise even locals will be switching over to EastEnders.

THE DAFT DOZEN

TWELVE football fans from the North East got themselves stuck on top of Kirkstone Pass while travelling to a match at Barrow.

The hapless dozen were travelling in a stretch limousine, hardly the best suited vehicle to a crossing of one of the Lake District’s highest and most notoriously weather-affected passes. In the end they were liberated with the assistance of a mountain rescue team whose own Land Rover had the devil of a job getting to the scene.

The fans said they were following the instructions given by their sat nav. Which prompts me to wonder whatever happened to those old, apparently forgotten virtues of map reading and commonsense?