The Observer

 A barbaric killing - The death penalty is not the answer

Ian Broadhurst, who was shot dead in Leeds last Friday, was the third police victim of homicide in 2003, the eighth to be killed on duty this century. None the less, the murder of police officers in this country remains mercifully rare. The use of guns in such crimes even rarer. Before PC Broadhurst, the last officer to be fatally shot was Phillip Walters, in east London in 1995.

But the death of a policeman on duty is a grave cause for concern and West Yorkshire's former chief constable and sometime government drug tsar, Keith Hellawell, responded to the Broadhurst shooting with a call to restore capital punishment. Yet most states in America have the death penalty, and many more police officers (and ordinary citizens) are murdered. It is hard to see how reintroduction here would make the streets safer for those in or out of uniform.

There are strong reasons why this newspaper has for decades opposed judicial executions. Some should be known to Mr Hellawell. It was his police force which conducted the investigations behind two of the worst miscarriages of justice - the wrongful conviction of Stefan Kizsko for murdering the child Lesley Molseed, and that of Judith Ward for planting an IRA bomb which killed 10 people. Both were freed years later by the Court of Appeal when it emerged that evidence proving their innocence had been withheld. Had there been a death penalty, both would have been executed.

But there are lessons we can learn from the US. The real problem is that despite tough firearm laws, illegal possession of guns is increasing. In Boston, Operation Ceasefire successfully reduced gun crime by a judicious mix of carrot and stick, involving communities in recognising the negative consequences on their families of a gun culture. Such initiatives offer hope. Calling for a return to the death penalty does not.