Now you’ve said it! Yet the accused is entitled to the best possible defence, isn’t he? This is something I could never understand, how lawyers can offer the best possible defence to scum who commit the vilest of deeds. When I read that Fritzl’s lawyer is promising a ‘vigorous defence’ of his client, I wanted to puke. This guy raped his own daughter 3000 times, as well as murdering several of their offspring. How can anyone defend that and be able to look at himself in a mirror?

[Daphne – I suppose they look at it in the same way as a hangman does: somebody has to do the job, and anyway, it’s a living. That’s fine by me. At least it’s legal, which is more than can be said for their clients and for the source of the money from which many of their fees are paid. What really gets to me is when they portray it as a noble calling, upholding the principles of justice and all that bollocks. They’d be more honest, and win more respect, if they called it by its name: dirty work, but hell, somebody has to do it.]

[Daphne – You know as I do that criminal lawyers have no more say in the matter than the judge does. The president can over-rule them all with a pardon which waives the rest of the sentence.]

[Daphne – Speak for yourself. Do you imagine that his family want to see him again? Don’t you have the imagination to understand what it means for people who more quiet and decent than most to live with the fact that their son did this? Given the terrible, nightmarish choice, what would you opt for: that your son is killed or that he stabs the mother of his child 50 times in front of your grand-daughter and gets a life sentence? I know what I would rather.]

As they are now, prison sentences are like puzzles: you start with a number (of years) expressed by the Court, then you have to work out an arithmetic problem to obtain the answer: how long will that person actually stay in prison.

[Daphne – You stand to be corrected and I’ll correct you. The Maltese system does not allow for ‘multiple’ sentences of this nature. Besides, if you have one sentence for one crime and another sentence for another crime altogether, then they run concurrently.]

[Daphne – Il-qadisa M*****a, Andew, you as well? Life means life everywhere, but in practically all western democracies, the state has found ways to release people serving a life sentence after a couple of decades at most, to clear out the prisons, relieve the prison administration of having to run an old people’s home, and let’s be honest, for humane reasons too.]

What I mean to say is that the crimes which led to life before the removal of capital punishment from our statute books were probably much less serious that those which lead to life today and it is not because we’re more enlightened but simply because then there was a more severe punishment “available”.

As to the US I suppose this depends on the state in question but I get the impression quite a few of them work it out by attaching a long prison sentence (such as, for example, a 100 years) which is hard to outlive. Unless, that is you are a 12 year old.

Finally, I don’t know if Attard’s “leaving prison in a coffin” is factual or a literary flourish. As far as I know there is a cemetery on the prison grounds where all those who received capital punishment are laid to rest. It would be interesting to know if those who die while serving a prison sentence (whether life or not) are laid to rest there too.

[Daphne – I can help you on the last point. Executed prisoners were buried within the prison compound. The bodies of prisoners who died while serving their sentence were released to their families for private burial, in the past as today.]