Where the Memories Lie Read Online Free PDF Page A

returned, and I didn’t fancy cooking. What I fancied was a
    big glass of wine. ‘He’s going to call later so you can have a chat, though.’
    ‘OK.’ She bent over her notebook and underlined something
    neatly with a red marker pen and a ruler. ‘I’ve got to do a project on capital punishment for Religion and Ethics.’
    ‘Oh, how nice,’ I drawled. I’d had a meeting with the school
    recently about them wanting to fast-track Anna through some
    of her subjects because they’d classified her as ‘gifted’. Ethan and I had debated this for a while. I didn’t think the school should be bandying about those kinds of terms. What about the other kids
    who weren’t gifted? How would it make them feel? Still, Anna was
    very intelligent, and we’d decided in the end to go ahead with it. It meant she was learning some of the curriculum a lot earlier than she should’ve been, but she was clearly enjoying it, and from her reports she was doing really well.
    ‘It’s really interesting, actually,’ she said. ‘What do you think
    about the death penalty?’
    What a cheery pre-dinner conversation. ‘We don’t have the
    death penalty in the UK.’
    ‘Yes, I know, but I don’t think I can put that excuse on my
    homework as to why I haven’t done it. We’ve got to consider the
    ethics behind it.’
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    Where the Memories Lie
    ‘Um . . . well, let me see.’ I shut the door on the pretty much
    empty fridge. Unless I could make something out of a lone cheese
    triangle, some dried-up flat leaf parsley, a wrinkly mushroom and
    a potato with sprouty bits on it, then dinner would be of the
    takeaway variety. ‘I think if you’re guilty of committing a crime −
    and presumably to get the death penalty we’re talking terrible
    types of murder − then I think you’d probably deserve it. I mean,
    take Myra Hindley, for example. What if she’d ever been let out
    of prison before she died? Or Peter Sutcliffe? People wouldn’t
    be safe, would they?’ I explained who they were. ‘So the death
    penalty could be for the protection of the public to make sure it
    doesn’t ever happen again. Plus, it would hopefully put people
    off doing such crimes in the first place and the crime rate might
    go down.’
    ‘Actually, from the research I’ve been doing so far, about
    90 percent of top criminologists in America think that the death
    penalty doesn’t act as a deterrent to reduce murder or violent crimes.
    And . . .’ she lifted her pen in the air and pointed it at me, ‘doesn’t it actually make you as bad as the criminal if you kill them?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why? It violates their human rights.’
    I rolled my eyes. I hated these in-depth ethics homework
    debates. Sometimes you just know things, don’t you? You know
    things are right or wrong, but you don’t want to spend all night
    analyzing why you know it. ‘Because people who kill and rape and torture shouldn’t have any human rights. They gave them up when
    they did whatever heinous crime they committed. And if a bunch
    of psychos were allowed to wreak havoc and do whatever they
    wanted without consequences, then we’d be living in a world of
    anarchy and chaos, wouldn’t we?’ Although I sometimes thought
    we already were living in such a world, anyway, but we were calling the psychos ‘governments’. ‘Every action has a reaction. Every deed 21
    Sibel Hodge
    has a consequence. There’s always a price to pay. And people have to think about that before they commit crimes.’
    ‘Yes, but two wrongs don’t make a right.’
    ‘Sometimes they do.’
    ‘You could make the criminal pay back to society by serving
    their time in prison instead. That would also give them punishment
    for what they’d done and would still protect the public.’
    ‘Not if they got let out again, which happens a lot now due
    to overcrowding. Most of the time they only serve piddly little
    sentences these days. And I wonder how many prisoners actually
    reoffend. Have you