Stephen Tall has added his name to the list of those who think that David Davis can't possibly be a liberal because of his support for the death penalty.

I was amused to see that a commenter on Stephen's piece points out that one of the prominent supporters of the death penalty was none other than John Locke, who opined:

Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of Nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property - that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. 

Chris Dillow, a man who is never likely to be mistaken for a Tory, has also posted at length on this subject and, rather amusingly for me, calls in his support none other than John Stuart Mill, who apparently said:

I defend this [the death] penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked-on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime…What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb, there to linger out what may be a long life in the hardest and most monotonous toil, without any of its alleviations or rewards--debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope, except a slight mitigation of bodily restraint, or a small improvement of diet?

As I've said in an earlier posting, many people seem to mistake "views commonly held by liberals" with liberalism itself. All these Liberals are going to have to explain to me how a the holding of a view that was shared by the two greatest philosophers of the liberal movement can be diagnostic of not being a liberal at all.