Justice dies by a thousand cuts

On Thursday, amid extraordinary scenes in a Lahore courtroom, a Pakistani judge sentenced a serial killer to be strangled, cut into pieces and dropped into a vat of acid - the same treatment Javed Iqbal had meted out to his 100 child victims. It is hard to conceive of a more obscene or ridiculous punishment, conjuring up images that seem more appropriate to a medieval account of hell. It is true that, throughout the trial, parents of the dead children kept up a demonstration outside the courtroom, demanding the death penalty, but even they probably did not anticipate a sentence of such uniquely baroque sadism.

The interior minister, Moinudeen Haider, quickly recognised the damage which had been done to his country's image, announcing that the punishment was illegal and a breach of Pakistan's human rights obligations. In view of his high-level intervention, and confirmation from Iqbal's lawyers that they plan to appeal, the citizens of Lahore are likely to be spared this gruesome spectacle, which the judge had ordered to be carried out in front of the victims' relatives in a local park.

One interpretation of these ghastly events is that they reflect a move in Islamic countries towards steadily more grotesque punishments. In 1994, the Iraqi government introduced amputation of hands and ears, branding of the forehead and execution for 30 criminal offences, including theft and food hoarding; these barbaric practices went on for two years, until an international outcry forced a government minister to announce their abolition. In Afghanistan, a sentence of cross amputation - severing a hand and foot on opposite sides of the body - was carried out in a public stadium as recently as February this year.

But Islamic countries do not have a monopoly on the impulses that lie behind such acts. When Timothy McVeigh was convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing, relatives of the victims were invited to appear in court, talk about their grief and offer their opinions on an appropriate punishment. One man, who had clearly seen too many horror films, wanted McVeigh to be kept alive while his legs were amputated at the knees and bamboo shoots encouraged to grow up into the stumps. Where this disgusting and time- consuming performance was to be staged, and by whom, was not addressed.

McVeigh was sentenced to death, by rather more direct means. But there could hardly be a more perfect example of the danger to civil society of abandoning the principle that a courtroom is a forensic arena, in which rational sentences are handed down by judges with no personal connection either to the defendant or the victims.

In recent years, this principle has taken quite a beating. Once it has been surrendered, the floodgates are open for the public exposure of revenge fantasies of the most revolting kind, and the pursuit of vendettas the ramifications of which continue to be felt for decades - precisely the outcome that a judicial system is set up to avoid. Even more to the point, when any society sanctions cruel and unusual punishments, it brings itself down to the level of the wretches whose behaviour it seeks to condemn.

"Either no member of the human race has real rights, or else all have the same", the French philosopher Condorcet observed more than two centuries ago, and we often forget that this applies to people who have committed terrible crimes. When I covered the Yorkshire Ripper murders, as a very young reporter, I was often asked whether I wanted the killer to face the death penalty. Even though I had interviewed several of the surviving victims, and felt under threat like most women in the north of England at that time, I always said no - I just wanted him locked up. Nothing the judicial system could legitimately do to Peter Sutcliffe could make him suffer as much as his victims, and even to attempt it would merely be to recreate ourselves in his image.

This is by no means a popular view. No public discussion of a notorious murder case can take place these days without demands for never-ending revenge by bereaved parents, children and friends. Reporters must bear some of the blame for this, for the way they deliberately incite controversy whenever the question of, say, the release date of the young men convicted of the murder of James Bulger is being considered. This is not to suggest that the families of murder victims do not continue to suffer for years after the crime, or that they are not entitled to their views. It is to argue that they have no special wisdom on the subject - that, on the contrary, their judgement is clouded by understandable emotion.

Their aims, and those of society at large, are frequently at odds with each other, given that the courts have to achieve a delicate balance between imposing punishment, expressing disapproval and allowing (in some cases at least) for the possibility of rehabilitation. There is always going to be a conflict, for example, between the argument that the death penalty is wrong in principle and a mother's longing to see her child's killer die on the scaffold. More and more these days, relatives are encouraged to indulge the human impulse towards vengeance, as though a punishment of sufficient gravity can compensate for their loss. It cannot, and last week's bizarre pronouncement in a Lahore courtroom is an awful warning of where that process ultimately leads.

Crime is much on my mind at the moment, as I have just had personal experience of it for the fourth time in a year. One evening last week, as I returned from seeing a movie locally, someone tried to rob me on a dark street. I got away and ran to a nearby fast-food shop, where one of the staff very kindly offered to see me home. The would-be muggers had by this time sped off in a car, leaving me shaken but unhurt.

At the end of April last year, I was in Soho when a nail bomb exploded in a pub - close enough to hear and feel the detonation, but without being injured. I ran into Old Compton Street, arriving at the same time as the police and paramedics, and will never forget the devastation I saw there. Three days later, on a beautiful spring afternoon, I was attacked by a stranger in the high road near my home. One night in September, I was woken by an unusual noise, crept downstairs and discovered a burglar on my porch. I froze, unable even to lift the phone in case he heard me, but he changed his mind and hurried off into the darkness.

Was all this just bad luck? I'm not sure. I don't think it gives me any special insights. London doesn't feel very safe at the moment, so I'm glad to be getting away for a few days at the end of the month to Istanbul, which is in an earthquake zone. Sometimes, a girl needs something new to worry about.