John Stevens, the same guy who told us that there were a squillion Al Qaeda terrorists hiding in London waiting to murder us in our beds, claims to have had a Pauline conversion on the issue of the death penalty.

Stevens claims that for 40 years he opposed the death penalty, but now that a police officer has been murdered in Yorkshire he supports it.

But why would this one police murder any more tragic than the dozens of others that have taken place over the last decade? If Stevens thought that the death penalty was wrong when WPC Yvonne Fletcher was murdered in 1984 and when PC Blakelock was murdered in Tottenham the following year, why does he think that it's AOK now? It's completely irrational.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Stevens' alleged Pauline conversion is just another poisonous lie, serving a rhetorical purpose, to follow the various other poisonous lies that have emerged from his ageing and cantankerous mouth.

That mouth has done enough damage to our country already, and it's time that Stevens learned to keep his poisonous opinions to himself.

If John Stevens isn't lying when he piously claims to have held a lifelong opposition to the death penalty, then he is clearly not mentally fit to get involved in this kind of public debate. In either instance, the media should not be giving this insidious little extremist a platform for his obscene and irrational views.

It's often said that people who have lost loved-ones to murder are the ones who should be listened to most in this kind of debate. I'm not sure that this is true, but as it happens, I lost someone I loved very much to a vicious murder not so long ago. The same people who often say that those who have lost loved ones should be listened to also seem quite keen to do the talking for us, and quite keen to assume that people like us want nothing more than to see one more human being gassed, eloctrocuted or strangled to death, or better still, killed slowly and chopped into little pieces.

Sorry, John, it just doesn't work that way. Plenty of people who've seen what death really means find your ideas on the death penalty disgusting and obscene.

So here's a life-lesson from the young to the decrepit:

Engage the BRAIN before you open your MOUTH and go saying things that are going to get yet more innocent people killed. Careless talk costs lives.

Now here's a six-word reminder, just for old-time's sake of why the death penalty is a very, very stupid idea:

Birmingham Six. Guildford Four. Winston Silcott.

Thousands of your police are liars just like you, John, and we know it. We know we can't trust them to tell the truth in court, even when someone's life is on the line. Now you may think that 10,000 dead Iraqis aren't enough. You may think that yet even innocent people getting murdered by the British government is a nice idea. But some of us aren't bedwetting sociopaths like you, even those of us who have seen loved ones murdered ourselves.

So next time you find yourself on the point of opening your mouth and pronouncing on a subject you know so little about, repeat this little six-word mantra to yourself, and everything will be OK. Birmingham Six. Guildford Four. Winston Silcott. AND RELAX....

And then once you've done that, think about your spiritual home, the State of Texas, where almost everyone who gets executed is not only poor but yes, you guessed it, BLACK. Think about the fact that the death penalty is, in practice, a nice big machine for killing ethnic minorities. Like that idea, do you, Johnny?

To everybody else, please let's work together to stop this madness. Where John Stevens goes, Tony Blair and the Tories soon follow. I can hear David Blunkett's dictaphone running right now, as he sketches out the "Big Idea" for his next all-expenses-paid keynote-speech: Time to Think The Unthinkable, David will say. Time For An Honest Debate About The Death Penalty. Shall we garotte them with cheesewire or tear out their internal organs with little hooks? Shall we hack them to death with machetes or herd them into gas chambers? And maybe David Cameron can join the fray too, with a little Tory working party on "rebranding Mediaeval justice".

John Stevens is trying to exploit the murder of an innocent woman for a disgusting piece of opportunist gameplaying. With the Blair cabal clearly intent on legalising torture, it was only a matter of time before the death penalty reared its ugly head again. These guys will not stop until they have destroyed everything that's decent about our country. It looks like the death penalty is next up...