THE FATAL shooting of a female police constable in Bradford, Yorkshire, has reopened the debate about capital punishment. Lord Stevens, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has argued in a newspaper article that the death penalty should be restored for the unique offence of murdering a police officer on duty. At first glance, public opinion appears to support him. But there were powerful reasons why Britain was right to drop capital punishment altogether, reasons still valid and in no way diminished by the appalling crime in Bradford.

Some support for restoring capital punishment may be seen as an immediate expression of sympathy for the colleagues, friends and family of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, who died answering a call to an armed robbery in the city. In other circumstances, such as the discovery of a serious miscarriage of justice that could have led to innocent people being executed, opinion tends to swing the other way. The quashing of the conviction of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven proved the fallibility of the criminal justice system and persuaded even someone as hard-line as Michael Howard, retiring leader of the Conservative Party, to change his mind.

As well as calls for the death penalty, there is also renewed debate about arming the police in Britain. On both issues, the police are themselves as divided as the rest of the community. Arming the police, many officers argue, would damage the relationship between themselves and the vast majority of the public. And there is no reason to suppose that the execution of those found guilty of murdering police officers would save a single life. Indeed, juries may be reluctant to convict such people even where they had good reason to.

Respect for the sacredness of human life does not automatically rule out the death penalty, at least if there was definite evidence that it might also help to preserve life. The Catholic Church?s position, expressed by Pope John Paul II in ...