All my life I've believed that the death penalty is unacceptable - a barbaric and out-dated act of vengeance that has no place in the modern world.
But that conviction has been sorely tested.
The case of David Fuller, who not only took the lives of two young women - Wendy Knell, 25, and Caroline Pierce, 20 -but also admitted 44 charges of necrophilia, involving women and girls aged between nine and 100 in morgues across Sussex and Kent, is beyond the comprehension of most people.
And when I read the account of Nevres Kemal, the mother of one of Fuller's victims, Azra Kemal, I felt an overwhelming sense of rage on her behalf, and on behalf of the families of all his other victims, which police fear may run into the hundreds.
After officers visited her home to tell her that the lifeless body of her beautiful, vibrant daughter had been violated not just once, but three times, by this monster - and that he had filmed himself doing so - she grabbed the nearest knife and ran to her local police station with the intention of putting ‘that knife straight through his heart because he'd put a knife through mine'.
All my life I've believed that the death penalty is unacceptable - a barbaric and out-dated act of vengeance that has no place in the modern world.
But that conviction has been sorely tested