The Moors murders are a grisly subject for any blog and I’m not going to recount the details. Since he was jailed for his part in orchestrating these terrible killings, Ian Brady has spent 43 years inside. Just one year before he started his stretch, the death penalty had been abolished for murder – and there were plenty of people at the time who would have happily made an exception for Brady and Myra Hindley from such clemency.

I have always been and will always be a staunch opponent of the death penalty. People kill other people in all sorts of circumstances; I have never felt that the state should stoop to their level and Ian Brady’s pathetic letter to a news agency decrying his treatment in Ashworth Hospital shows why.

For the past 10 years, he has been on a hunger strike of sorts, consuming only nicotine and caffeine in protest at being denied the right to die. He says that he should never be released and has nothing to live for. In short, he wants a choice.

Brady is clearly a very disturbed and deluded individual but the choice about death that he seeks now is precisely that he denied to his victims – all children aged between 10 and 17. And in my view it is right that he should be kept alive whatever the cost so that he has as much time as possible to think about his actions all those years ago. Five youngsters, who would now be in their fifties and have families of their own, gone; five families and sets of parents (few of whom are left) devastated and destroyed; a whole community rocked by fear and shock and a nation’s innocence shattered.

The long drop would indeed have been a quick and easy solution for both Hindley and Brady. It wasn’t until 1985 that they both finally confessed to their crimes and the body of Keith Bennett has never been – and may never be – found on Saddleworth Moor. But they were given something that they denied their victims - a chance at life.

Brady has refused to engage with the prison service, showed himself incompetent to undergo treatment and has spent the entire 43 years in an isolation that has been as arrogant as it is self-loathing. He doesn’t want to confront relinquishing the control he so enjoyed while killing.

A chance at life is worth everything and the ultimate act of power. We, nor anyone else, owe him anything more.