Beheading is a bit of a blunt instrument

EDWIN CUSSEN (Irish Examiner letters, March 8) is on a sticky wicket with his call for public executions

As these are, naturally enough, crimes in themselves it kind of begs the question: who gets to decide? As tools of repression, they have been tried with varying degrees of barbarity throughout history, in Russian, German, Chinese, South African and Cambodian prisons, gulags or concentration camps, often for political reasons.

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan also linked this, ahem, humanitarian solution to religious fanaticism, where they got to play some nasty notion of God in football stadia and public arenas.