The macabre Web

The big white moron advertising the Big Black Box for M-Web gets it completely wrong. Getting connected offers far more than the opportunity to "deposit a million bucks, buy a Ferrari, get a girlfriend, buy HER a Ferrari" and put yourself to sleep on stage.

A certain kind of person is drawn to communicating with "dead men walking", whether they`re guilty or not.

Carel Alberts, Technology editor, ITWeb

Just looking at the really grisly stuff out there will cure you of any cosy idea you may have, that the Web is an increasingly regulated space, inhabited by responsible companies and watchdogs, or even a very nice place to be.

Some links sent to me by someone with a knack and a bent for the weird and macabre have done exactly that.

Ever wondered what goes on in the head of a convicted murderer? Here`s your chance. CCADP is an organisation that gives ordinary folk the chance to write to death-row inmates.

It`s easy to react with horror to such things, to think we know for sure that someone who has been found guilty of a grotesque crime is in fact really guilty. But today we know enough about the legal mind to accept that courts are: (a) indeed quite thorough, but also (b) merely procedure-bound. This means they have no delusions of being able to ensure justice. So it`s possible your inmate is not guilty, as all inmates say they are.

But that`s not even the point of this site. A certain kind of person is drawn to communicating with "dead men walking", whether they`re guilty or not. I won`t attempt to profile them, other than to say you need to be brave. The whole thing is complicated by the political issue of the suitability or not of the death penalty, so people who write letters probably differ a lot in their motivations.

I find it difficult to say there`s anything wrong with feeling compassion for people who are contemplating their own certain death. But I would caution against writing to them. Only if you have the guts, the curiosity and completely blameless motives, write to the prisoner closest to home, in Zambia. He may need your letter.

Other sites attempt to put the American justice system on trial, like the one that hopes to get to the bottom of the "wrongful conviction" of Darlie Routier. Routier was found to have killed her children.

I think questioning of this nature is good, even mandatory in a democracy, but unfortunately the site is shrouded in emotive talk and flavoured with conspiracy language, which makes it hard to take seriously, even if the US justice system is an easy target. The site doesn`t seem to answer the most obvious question: what`s it to you (the Web site creator)? Anne Good, the name given at the bottom of the landing page, sounds suspiciously like an obvious and clumsy nom de plume anyway, like Mr E.

Father Nick Thomas is an off-the-wall priest who has visions. I`d say if you have the guts to write to prisoners, and you escape unscathed, you`ll probably find your appetite has been whetted for weird accounts such as the ones listed here.

But don`t be taken in. The stuff reads like a collection of short stories, on top of which the stories old Nick tells hardly attest to his ecumenical learning. So take it with a pinch of salt. Over your shoulder, if the colouring on the site, the dramatic, hooded figures and Nick`s own name are anything to go by.

While the first site I list is anti-death penalty, this one tells both sides of the story. DPInfo is so cold and pitiless, you`ll find it hard to sympathise with its mission, which is to be bloodlessly informative. It sells T-shirts that advertise the site where you can get complete rosters of who is on death-row, where, and for what.

Florida, the US state that cannot count, as the Bush/Gore election drama testified, has a similar site, offering stats on death-row inmates.

To end off on a high note, I saved the best for last: as seen on the Net, an all-new, never-to-be-repeated opportunity of a lifetime! Scheduled Executions, a site that is shamefully pro-death, sends notifications of the next injection/switch-flicking/stoning/whatever it is they do these days in various parts of the world.

The site has cute slogans and motivational quotes such as the one by Alphonse Karr (1808-1890), a French journalist-cum-novelist: "If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers."

Nice. We`ll just go on killing then, until all this senseless killing stops.