Ballot box should have decided senator’s fate

I WRITE regarding Senator David Norris’s withdrawal from the Presidential race.

In his letters to the Israeli authorities, Senator Norris pleads for clemency for his friend.

It calls to mind the Merchant of Venice’s court scene: the conflict between Portia’s appeal to the ‘milk of human kindness’, and its polar opposite — the all-too-human desire for the ‘pound of flesh’ in resolving competing claims of justice.