AN EVENING Press phone poll has shown overwhelming support for the York family of a murdered schoolgirl, who have launched a campaign to bring back the death penalty for child sex killers.

Yesterday, the Evening Press exclusively reported that the York relatives of Nicola Fellows - who was killed aged nine with her best friend, Karen Hadaway, ten, in Brighton in 1986 in a case dubbed the "babes in the wood" murders - have called for the return of the death penalty following the murders of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

More than 92 per cent of people who took part in our phone poll on the subject agreed with Nicola's aunt, Gillian Chambers, who together with her daughter, Tia, 25, launched the campaign. Onlyt 7.6 per cent opposed it.

About two-thirds of participants in our internet poll also backed the family's view, with only one-third opposing it.

Mrs Chambers said she was overwhelmed by the result and determined to keep circulating petitions.

She said: "I would like to think that this time it will work. This shows that people do care as much as us.

"I desperately want hanging brought back, but I also want what judges say in court to mean something.

"If people are given a life sentence and are let out in seven years that is not life. Nicola will never have her life back."

Robert Goodwill, Ryedale-based Euro MP for Yorkshire and Humber, who backs the death penalty, has warned that Britain would first need to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights to bring back hanging.

The agreement enshrines in law the right to life and prevents signatories from introducing the death penalty.

Mr Goodwill said: "I have always been in favour of reintroducing the death penalty. I have got small children myself and I cannot begin to imagine what the parents of murdered children have to go through."

But Paul Eccles, spokesman for the York Socialist Alliance, opposed the campaign. He said: "Given the rotten state of the British justice system we have to ask how many innocent people would have been executed? "We have seen many cases of miscarriages of justice and there are still many campaigns to free innocent people."

Updated: 12:28 Saturday, August 24, 2002