Earlier this month, I warned Nancy Hohbach that her Winding Roads column could get considerable negative feedback.

It dealt with a variety of subjects including the Scott Peterson trial, written before the verdict in that trial.

She stated, "I think they should have just tied a heavy stone around his waist, took him three miles out in the ocean, threatened to drop him if he didn't cough up what really happened and if he didn't open up, drop him."

She also proposed an alternative method of interrogation - "take him to an electrical chair and give him some minor charge as a sample of what it's going to be like if the truth doesn't come flowing out."

Nancy did receive several comments on that column, all of them positive.

It's disappointing how many people don't understand the principles on which the country was founded, principles we have preserved throughout our history at great cost.

I know some of you are saying, "Come on, can't you take a joke?"

Nancy wasn't totally serious. After the column was published she surprised herself by what she had written. But I don't think the positive comments were so much an appreciation of the humor (which escapes me) but a yearning people share with Nancy for a simpler and quicker system of justice.

They want a system of justice that doesn't result in a sensational murder trial dominating the national news for months. Getting rid of our criminal justice system, in favor of a lynch mob resolution of legal issues, would do more to reduce annoyingly repetitive TV content than anything else except scrapping our custom of holding democratic elections.

I understand the suggestion that we simply kill people suspected of capital crimes. I don't agree with it, but I understand it. That's the way most of the world has operated for thousands of years.

What I can't understand is the desire to torture people into confessing first. Nancy is not alone in her belief that a confession obtained by torture or threat of death has some value. During the Inquisition, church officials never considered the possibility that a man on the rack might be confessing only to get relief from having his limbs pulled out of their sockets.

We don't have to go back to the Middle Ages for examples of this attitude. Early in the previous century, a federal court threw out a conviction based upon the confession of a man who had been tied down and beaten prior to the confession.

There had to be some prosecutor who might have thought the interrogation technique was inappropriate but that was no reason to throw out an otherwise perfectly good confession.

This court decision was long before the Miranda decision by the Supreme Court, which attempted to protect suspects even from trickery and intimidation by law enforcement officers. Some people think the Miranda decision went too far. I don't and neither do many, if not most, law enforcement officers who have no objection to operating within the constraints of Miranda.

Humanity, even in modern America, is not far enough removed from irrational brutality that we can indulge fantasies of a simpler and quicker system of justice.