DOES killing people ever solve anything? A regular exchange of death doesn't seem to have brought the Palestinians and Israelis any closer together. Neither has it encouraged the Indians and Pakistanis to patch up their differences over Kashmir.

The lynch mobs of southern America failed spectacularly to secure white supremacism, and Republican terror-ists didn't unite Ireland. All they did was keep spinning the cycle of destruction.

In fact, it is hard to think of any killing spree that has promoted a better, happier world. The only case that springs to mind is the last war. Then, the slaughter of millions of people was justified as necessary to stop a yet greater evil. But might it have been better if the world had sought to eradicate the poverty and impotence that breeds fascism in the first place?

We have still to learn this lesson. And there are always new Hitlers ready to take bloody advantage of our amnesia. Top despots recommend death: there is no better way to cling on to power than by brute force and butchery.

Just ask Robert Mugabe. He's addicted to killing, either quickly, in the case of political opponents, or slowly, in the case of the Zimbabwean population, whom he figures can go starve.

Just ask Slobadon Milosevic, who yesterday sat in the war crimes dock to hear a harrowing account of a Kosovan massacre during his barbarous reign. Remember, too, the Chinese tyrants who turned the tanks on their own unarmed people, and the East German State police who made so many fathers and brothers disappear.

Here, then, are two facts, two absolute, irrefutable facts. One: killing people solves nothing. Two: the biggest fans of State-sanctioned killing are the world's most infamous dictators and regimes.

That is why I'm against the death penalty. That and the fact that killing people is wrong.

Judging by our Evening Press tele-phone poll, a lot of you will disagree. But it is far easier to furiously prod a few numbers on a telephone than to consider the moral and rational arguments against executing people.

And that is the word to cling to: people. Whoever killed Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman was a person. Roy Whiting, convicted of murdering Sarah Payne, is a human being. The same can be said of all the child abusers, the rapists, the sadists and the rest.

They are not scum or monsters. These are the labels we use to distance ourselves from them. The uncomfortable truth is, they are as much a part of humanity as we are.

If we allow the State to kill convicted murderers, make no mistake, we are killing them ourselves. Just because someone else chokes them, or electrocutes them, or poisons them does not lessen our responsibility for their death.

By reintroducing capital punishment we embark on our own killing spree. We indulge our own bloodlust just as freely as those we are putting to death.

You could argue that we would be even less concerned about the sanctity of life than the murderer. At least he did his own dirty work. The executioner would do it for us.

Like the gangland boss, we'd give the signal and look away while our hench-man moves in for the kill.

We should, of course, seek ways to protect children from those people who would do them harm. We must explore every option, from rehabilitation programmes to chemical castration: a repentant, guilt-riddled child abuser may welcome the latter option as a way of freeing them from their most destructive impulses.

But we have another responsibility to our children: to create the most civilised, least violent, society we can. And that means less killing, not more.

Updated: 12:11 Wednesday, August 28, 2002