OUTRAGE!

Nothing is clearer than this - the only problem with capital punishment in America is the infrequency of its use. Americans, who as a matter of course parade their vulgarity as if it were a second skin, suddenly become country vicars when the subject of executing a low rogue comes about. Those who urinate with drumbeat predictability upon a neighbor's lawn are suddenly willing to count angels and split hairs.

"Well," they'll reason, "he did kill two people who were happily married. But there's nothing, oh, special about the way he slayed them. The woman wasn't raped and it appears their property was more or less left intact, no doubt as a courtesy to the couple's inheritors. It's as if there was an underlying courtesy to the slaughter, which must be acknowledged in a court of law." With this in mind, Americans on a jury will mutter at each other for five days, then bleat: "Life it is!"

Of course, had the rogue done something truly horrible like take the couple's car, then Americans - of course! - will consider throwing execution into the bisque of options stewing before them.

Rubbish, I say. Hang these killers and let daemons sort them out. But there are crimes so low, so fiendish, that hanging - or being tied in a sack with a gorilla and a cobra and thrown into the Tiber - seems more a tip of the hat to the criminal's perfidy than the punishment it's intended to be. Indeed, hell is no place for these scalliwags, since its master Lucifer is an angel fallen from God and thus linked to the divine. No, for these impish, contemptible dogs a special hell must be made - crawling with beasts of darkness, riddled with tortures unknown even to the vilest Arab, and supervised by unbathed Romanians.

Such a crime has been uncovered recently, and forgive me if its depravity spawns a certain irrationality in my prose: a 22-year-old American savage has been caught impersonating a British royal. The surreptitious beast claimed to be "Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the Fifth Duke of Cleveland" and demanded the students of an American public school in Minnesota refer to him as "your grace." After fooling some of the lowborns for a time, the students managed to intuit, as all plebians do instinctively in the presence of their betters, though in this case their primitive understanding came to fruition due to their betters's absence, that this pasty, moderately obese, bespectacled layabout was no "duke."

Since Americans will be reading this, I find it problematic to use the phrase "needless to say," but such concerns notwithstanding, needless to say this treasonous pig would be dangling from a rope if he tried this subterfuge in England. Rich and poor, low and high, young and old, man and woman - all would unite to put the scum to death. In the place of my birth during my 22nd year, ironically, we uncoverd a Scotsman who claimed to be a "laird" in his native Edinborough. At first we laughed it off, since proclaiming oneself "laird" is a bit like seizing title to assistant manager of the women's footware section in a smallish department store, and this goes doubly when making the claim in England, in front of actual royalty.

But there's the principle, even when dealing with Scotch royalty. We assembled the citizens, who:

1. Cut out his tongue and fed it to swine;

2. Gouged his eyes forth and used them for a short-lived game of marbles;

3. Dispatched with his nose, causing the children to laugh uncontrollably as he now resembled the very swine to which his tongue had been fed - I believed the lads called him "Swiney Todd," though their rantings were difficult to comprehend because of the "lairdly" screaming;

4. Sliced off his fingers and toes and stuffed them in every orifice, natural and man-made;

5. Opened his gut and rolled out his intestines, cutting out whatever victuals he may have obtained by his fraud;

6. Had him hanged.

Yes, yes - in the words of my father: "You call that punishment?" If I had the resources, I would have doubled the length of the four-hour ordeal in the interests of justice, but I had only a few constables, who were unable to control the mob's zeal for seeing the scales balanced before their eyes. As they say in the States, he got off light.

As will this pagan, sub-human malefactor I wrote of earlier, no doubt. There's little wonder why those who impersonate royals do so routinely in the United States, where the "punishment" is as likely to be a six-figure book deal as it is a night in the stockade, as opposed to England, where the word punishment yields no confusion among the populace.

- Twimbley Duddleston IV