to a term of life imprisonment raises troubling questions for people on both sides of the capital punishment debate.

We can only assume that the decision to commute was made after consulting with the Advisory Committee for the Prerogative of Mercy, although we will never know for certain as its membership is a secret and its recommendations -- and the reasons for them -- are rarely made public.

This may well remove the committee from extreme public pressure to make a decision one way or another, but it makes it difficult for the public to understand the reasoning behind a recommendation.

Normally in cases concerning the death penalty, the issues are relatively clear. The convicted person does not want to die and exhausts every avenue of appeal before the Governor decides whether or not to commute the sentence.

There are often questions of motivation, identity and the mental fitness of the accused to be taken into account, and very often it is one of these factors which will cause sufficient doubt to be cast on the case and will result in commutation -- as has happened in every instance of a death sentence since 1977.

The possibility that the wrong person is being hanged -- no matter how remote that may be -- will always have to be weighed by those who are the final arbiters of whether a person lives or dies.

The West case was different since Rudolph West refused to cooperate in any appeal and made it clear that he wanted to be executed. There has never been much question that he killed his wife, and the act appeared to be deliberate, although there may have been some question about his mental state at the time of the offence and at the time of his trial. But this was never put forward as a defence, and he was judged fit to stand trial.

So it is difficult to understand what grounds Lord Waddington may have found for commutation.

Instead, it seems more likely that there is an informal policy in place of always commuting death sentences.

Whether the reason is fear of a riot or pressure from the British Government, the time has surely come simply to take the death sentence off the books and replace it with life imprisonment.

It would be fairer both for the victim's family and the person facing the sentence to end this tortuous process by which a man or woman's life is held in the balance -- sometimes for years at end -- before he or she is ultimately reprieved. Instead, people convicted of premeditated murder should be imprisoned to life without parole.