Wrong

Saddam death would worsen Iraq violence: lawyer|Reuters.com

The lawyer in question is, however, nutty Ramsey Clarke. Just as a reminder, remember this, and Hitchen's article about him here. The best part of Hitchen's column is this:

He [Clarke] has now twice said in public that, given the war with the Shiite republic of Iran, Saddam was entitled to take stern measures. “He had this huge war going on, and you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt,” he told the BBC.

To this he calmly added that he himself had more than once been shoved aside by Secret Service agents eager to defend the president of the United States (and of course one remembers the mass arrests, beatings and executions that followed the assassination attempts on presidents Ford and Reagan).

The worst thing from the Reuters story is this:

On Tuesday a prosecutor said a separate trial is to begin in August in which Saddam would face genocide charges in the killings of tens of thousands of Iraqs' Kurds in 1988 in a military operation to force them from their villages.

Let's just hope that they don't want to spend years delaying punishment just to secure more and more death penalty sentences.