WA Chief Justice David Malcolm said incarceration was...

WA Chief Justice David Malcolm said incarceration was a serious enough punishment for heinous crimes and he was yet to be convinced of the effectiveness of the death penalty. "It takes away the sanctity of life and, from my personal point of view, I regard the sanctity of human life as paramount and put that as number one," Justice Malcolm said. WA was a classic research case because capital punishment had had no relation to the number of crimes committed in the state, Justice Malcolm said. "In the last 120 years, the murder rate has remained at 2.3 per 100,000 despite the presence, absence, enforcement or non-enforcement of capital punishment," he said.