Go on, admit it. You’d press the switch. You’d pull the lever, for some of them. There have been times when you would have been perfectly happy to perform the execution yourself.

When you think of some of those child rapists or murderers that we are now obliged to incarcerate, at vast expense to the taxpayer – haven’t you wished, however fleetingly, that Britain still had the death penalty?

Take the case of that police officer, Wayne Couzens, who abused his position of trust to kill Sarah Everard in 2021. He waved his warrant card to get her into his vehicle. He used his police handcuffs to immobilise her.

He then raped and murdered her, in what bore all the hallmarks of a premeditated crime. Did you feel sudden cold rage, as the evidence unfolded – and wish that Couzens could meet the same fate as his victim?

I bet you did; and I bet you felt the same when you learned of the way Axel Rudakubana killed those little girls at a dance class in Southport in 2024. And as for the nurse who cold-bloodedly murdered all those babies in the maternity ward, when no one was looking…

Think of the grief of the parents, whose lives have been blighted for ever. Why should someone be allowed to kill so many infants, and go on to mooch around in jail, watching TV?

What was her name again, Lucy Letby?

Oh yes. Hmmm.

She’s the one that so many people now say is innocent, including some of my illustrious fellow columnists.

Well, no one and nothing could help her now, if she had already gone to the gallows.

That’s the problem with the death penalty. It’s never quite as simple as you think.

If you want to see why we would be insane to bring back capital punishment in this country, look at the agony of the authorities in Tennessee, where they have been trying – and tragicomically failing – to discharge the law in the case of Christa Pike, 50.

This Pike committed a particularly vile murder, at the age of 18, when she and her accomplice lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to her death.

Pike helped to beat the poor girl so brutally that she was able to keep a fragment of her skull as a memento. There is not much to be said in favour of Christa Pike.

But there is absolutely nothing to be said in favour of keeping her for 31 years on Death Row, at phenomenal expense, while lawyers have argued back and forth, and then trying twice this week to kill her with an injection of pentobarbital – and botching it!

The execution went on so long that staff had to draw the curtains, to prevent the official witnesses from seeing what was going on, though loud snoring could still be heard.

The state then rushed her to hospital, to spend even more money trying to revive the person they had just been trying to kill.

No one seems to have a clue what is going to happen next; whether the God-fearing folk of Tennessee will take Pike’s survival as proof of divine intervention, and call it quits, or whether they will persist, and have another crack at bumping her off – perhaps by firing squad. I am no lawyer, but I can’t believe that this will be straightforward.

We must assume that the condemned woman is now pretty poorly, perhaps brain-damaged.

Heinous as Pike’s crime was, it looks as though the authorities may be deemed guilty, if they try again, of administering a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, in breach of the 8th amendment to the US constitution. You can see what is going to happen – the eternal legal wrangling, the bills mounting the whole time.

Even if Tennessee can sort it out, and they get clearance to try, again, to terminate her life, we are entitled to ask what the whole thing will have achieved.

Will Pike’s execution deter a single potential murderer in Tennessee? I doubt it. The death penalty may help to gratify our general lust for revenge, and it may give grieving families some sense that justice has been done.

But is that enough, on its own, to justify the risks, the expense, and the inevitable miscarriages of justice?

If capital punishment were really effective in preventing crime, then you might expect its deterrent power to be demonstrated in the figures from Tennessee. But it turns out that there are more murders in that one state, every year, than there are in the whole of England and Wales; and bear in mind that the population of Tennessee is 7.3million, as against about 62million in England and Wales.

I would have thought that was a pretty devastating rejoinder, by the way, to all those irritating MAGA types who like to claim that modern Britain is now a comparative cesspit of criminality. You are about eight times more likely to be murdered in Tennessee than you are in England.

It is clear that the death penalty does not work in keeping crime down. The expense, delay and incompetence in the case of Christa Pike are proof of the folly of giving the state the power to end its citizens’ lives.

What no one can seriously deny, on the other hand, is the wisdom of keeping serious offenders in prison – and for as long as possible.

You may not believe it, but many crimes have been falling over the past 20 years, both in the US and in the UK; and those long-term declines have coincided with a notable shift to the Right in penal policy.

Under pressure from the public, and from conservative politicians, sentences have been getting noticeably longer, on both sides of the Atlantic. The average custodial sentence in the UK in 1996 was 16 months, whereas by 2024 it had risen to 22.5 months. The average minimum tariff for murder has risen from 13 years in 2000 to 21 years today.

That is one of the reasons why the jails are so full, and it is precisely because the jails are so full – and some of the worst habitual offenders are being kept off the streets – that crime has been falling.

That is why Andy Burnham is so wrong and so mad in now giving way to the softies, and letting out so many hundreds of offenders early – some of whom have committed serious crimes.

They will re-offend, and ordinary people will suffer. The truth is that prison works. It’s the best option for all serious crime.

It’s much cheaper than trying to run a Death Row, with all the expensive appeals and stays of execution. There’s less risk of a disastrous miscarriage of justice, and it’s just as effective in keeping the murderers off the streets.

They may be a threat to their fellow inmates, but not to the public. I know how sickening it is, to think of these monsters behind bars. I sympathise with the lust for vengeance.

But if we want to know what it would really be like to revive capital punishment today – look at the farce in Tennessee.

Don’t string ’em up. It’s way too expensive, and things can go wrong.

Just bang ’em up for ever.