Capital Punishment in the United Kingdom Part I

 Capital punishment in the United Kingdom predates the formation of the UK, having been used within the British Isles from ancient times until the second half of the 20th century. The last executions in the United Kingdom were by hanging, and took place in 1964; capital punishment for murder was suspended in 1965 and finally abolished in 1969 (1973 in Northern Ireland). Although unused, the death penalty remained a legally defined punishment for certain offences such as treason until it was completely abolished in 1998; the last execution for treason took place in 1946. In 2004 the 13th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights became binding on the United Kingdom; it prohibits the restoration of the death penalty as long as the UK is a party to the convention (regardless of the UK’s status in relation to the European Union).

Background

Capital punishment was historically used to punish inherently innocent things such as unemployment. In 16th-century England, no distinction was made between vagrants and the jobless; both were simply categorized as "sturdy beggars", who were to be punished and moved on. In 1547, a bill was passed that subjected vagrants to death for the second offence. During the reign of Henry VIII, as many as 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed.

Sir Samuel Romilly, speaking to the House of Commons on capital punishment in 1810, declared that "[there is] no country on the face of the earth in which there [have] been so many different offences according to law to be punished with death as in England". Known as the "Bloody Code", at its height the criminal law included some 220 crimes punishable by death, including "being in the company of Gypsies for one month", "strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7–14 years of age" and "blacking the face or using a disguise whilst committing a crime". Many of these offences had been introduced by the Whig oligarchy to protect the property of the wealthy classes that emerged during the first half of the 18th century, a notable example being the Black Act of 1723, which created 50 capital offences for various acts of theft and poaching. Crimes eligible for the death penalty included shoplifting and stealing sheep, cattle, and horses, and before abolition of the death penalty for theft in 1832, "English law was notorious for prescribing the death penalty for a vast range of offences as slight as the theft of goods valued at twelve pence."

Whilst executions for murder, burglary and robbery were common, the death sentences for minor offenders were often not carried out. A sentence of death could be commuted or respited (permanently postponed) for reasons such as benefit of clergy, official pardons, pregnancy of the offender or performance of military or naval duty. Between 1770 and 1830, an estimated 35,000 death sentences were handed down in England and Wales, of which 7,000 executions were carried out.

Reform

In 1808, Romilly had the death penalty removed for pickpockets and lesser offenders, starting a process of reform that continued over the next 50 years. The death penalty was mandatory (although it was frequently commuted by the government) until the Judgement of Death Act 1823 gave judges the official power to commute the death penalty except for treason and murder. The Punishment of Death, etc. Act 1832 reduced the number of capital crimes by two-thirds. In 1832, the death penalty was abolished for theft, counterfeiting, and forgery except for the forgery of wills and certain powers of attorney.

Gibbeting was abolished in 1832 and hanging in chains was abolished in 1834. In 1837, the death penalty for forging wills and powers of attorney was abolished. The death penalty for rape and some other offences was abolished by the Substitution of Punishments of Death Act in 1841. In 1861, several acts of Parliament (24 & 25 Vict; c. 94 to c. 100) further reduced the number of civilian capital crimes in England and Wales to five: murder, treason, espionage, arson in royal dockyards, and piracy with violence; there were other offences under military law. The 1866 report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment noted further obsolete capital offences in Scots law which had not yet been formally repealed. The death penalty remained mandatory for treason and murder unless commuted by the monarch.

The 1866 Royal Commissioners concluded (with dissenters) that there was not a case for abolition but recommended an end to public executions. This proposal was included in the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868. From that date executions in Great Britain were carried out only in prisons. The punishment of beheading and quartering those executed for treason was abolished in 1870. The last application of that punishment had been in 1820 and the last sentence to the punishment had been in 1839.

The Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1887 abolished the death penalty in Scots law for crimes other than murder, "treason or rebellion against the Sovereign", and (in theory but not in practice) certain types of attempted murder.  Relevant offenses, which were obsolete or for which lesser punishments had long applied in practice, included theft furtum grave; robbery or stouthrief; piracy; breaking into houses or ships; destroying ships; fire raising; certain classes of malicious mischief; beating and cursing parents; hamesucken; aggravated rape; abduction; returning to Scotland after banishment for performing a marriage without banns; incest; sodomy; and bestiality.

20th century

In 1908, the Children Act 1908 banned the execution of juveniles under the age of 16. In 1922 a new offence of infanticide was introduced to replace the charge of murder for mothers killing their children in the first year of life. In 1930 a parliamentary select committee recommended that capital punishment be suspended for a trial period of five years, but no action was taken. From 1931 pregnant women could no longer be hanged (following the birth of their child) although in practice since the 18th century their sentences had always been commuted.

In 1933 the minimum age for capital punishment was raised to 18 under the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. The last known execution by the civilian courts of a person under 18 was that of Charles Dobell, 17, hanged at Maidstone together with his accomplice William Gower, 18, in January 1889. Harold Wilkins, at 16 years old, was the last juvenile sentenced to the death penalty in the United Kingdom, in 1932 for a sexually related murder, but he was reprieved due to age.

In 1938 the issue of the abolition of capital punishment was brought before parliament. A clause within the Criminal Justice Bill called for an experimental five-year suspension of the death penalty. When war broke out in 1939 the bill was postponed. It was revived after the war in 1948 and to much surprise was adopted by a majority in the House of Commons (245 to 222). In the House of Lords the abolition clause was defeated but the remainder of the bill was passed as the Criminal Justice Act 1948. Popular support for abolition was absent and the government decided that it would be inappropriate for it to assert its supremacy by invoking the Parliament Act 1911 over such an unpopular issue.

Postwar

The then Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, instead set up a new Royal Commission (the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949–1953) with instructions to determine "whether the liability to suffer capital punishment should be limited or modified". The commission's report discussed a number of alternatives to execution by hanging (including the electric chair, gas inhalation, lethal injection, shooting, and the guillotine), but rejected them. It had more difficulty with the principle of capital punishment. Popular opinion believed that the death penalty acted as a deterrent to criminals, but the statistics within the report were inconclusive. Whilst the report recommended abolition from an ethical standpoint, it made no mention of possible miscarriages of justice.

The public had by then expressed great dissatisfaction with the verdict in the case of Timothy Evans, who was tried and hanged in 1950 for murdering his infant daughter. It later transpired in 1953 that John Christie had strangled at least six women in the same house; he also confessed to killing Timothy's wife. If the jury in Evans's trial had known this, Evans might have been acquitted. There were other cases in the same period where doubts arose over convictions and subsequent hangings, such as the notorious case of Derek Bentley.

The commission concluded that unless there was overwhelming public support in favor of abolition, the death penalty should be retained.

Between 1900 and 1949, 621 men and 11 women were executed in England and Wales. Ten German agents were executed during the First World War under the Defense of the Realm Act 1914, and 16 spies were executed during the Second World War under the Treachery Act 1940.

Whereas the 1866 Naval Discipline Act made "All Spies for the Enemy" subject to death, the Naval Discipline Act 1957 only made spying capital for non-naval personnel if it occurred on naval ships or bases. (The Official Secrets Act 1911 had created a separate non-capital spying offense.)

By 1957 a number of controversial cases highlighted the issue of capital punishment again. Campaigners for abolition were partially rewarded with the Homicide Act 1957. The Act brought in a distinction between capital and non-capital murder.

1957 Homicide Act Offences punishable by death

Only six categories of murder were now punishable by execution:

In the course or furtherance of theft

By shooting or causing an explosion

While resisting arrest or during an escape

Of a police officer

Of a prison officer by a prisoner

The second of two murders committed on different occasions (if both done in Great Britain).

The police and the government were of the opinion that the death penalty deterred offenders from carrying firearms and it was for this reason that such offences remained punishable by death.

Free votes

The 1957 act was the last time a three-line whip was imposed in Parliament on the death penalty. Apart from the 1948 Commons decision to accede to the Lords' amendment, all other votes from the 1939 suspension bill to the 1994 reintroduction motion have been free votes with the issue regarded as a matter of conscience. These have been instigated by a backbencher (by motion or private member's bill) rather than on behalf of the Government or the official Opposition. Some commentators see this conscience treatment as a way for political parties to insulate themselves from a backlash over an issue on which their leadership's support for abolition differed from public support for the death penalty.

Abolition

In 1965 the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, who had committed himself to the cause of abolition for longer than 20 years, introduced a Private Member's Bill to suspend the death penalty for murder. It was passed on a free vote in the House of Commons by 200 votes to 98. The bill was subsequently passed by the House of Lords by 204 votes to 104. Silverman was opposed in the General Election 1966 in the Nelson and Colne constituency by Patrick Downey, the uncle of Lesley Anne Downey, a victim in the Moors murders case, who stood on an explicitly pro-hanging platform. Downey polled over 5,000 votes, 13.7%, and then the largest vote for a genuinely independent candidate since 1945.

The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 suspended the death penalty in Great Britain (but not in Northern Ireland) for murder for a period of five years, and substituted a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment; it further provided that if, before the expiry of the five-year suspension, each House of Parliament passed a resolution to make the effect of the Act permanent, then it would become permanent. In 1969 the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, proposed a motion to make the Act permanent, which was carried in the Commons on 16 December 1969, and a similar motion was carried in the Lords on 18 December. The death penalty for murder was abolished in Northern Ireland on 25 July 1973 under the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973.

Following the abolition of the death penalty for murder, the House of Commons held a vote during each subsequent parliament until 1997 to restore the death penalty. This motion was always defeated, but the death penalty remained for other crimes until the dates mentioned below:

Causing a fire or explosion in a naval dockyard, ship, magazine or warehouse (until the Criminal Damage Act 1971);

Spying in ships of the Royal Navy, or its establishments abroad (until the Armed Forces Act 1981);

Piracy with violence (until the Crime and Disorder Act 1998);

Treason (until the Crime and Disorder Act 1998);

Certain purely military offenses under the jurisdiction of the armed forces. The last applicable offenses (until the Human Rights Act 1998) were:

Serious misconduct in action;

Assisting the enemy;

Obstructing operations;

Giving false air signals;

Mutiny or incitement to mutiny; and

Failure to suppress a mutiny with intent to assist the enemy.

However, no executions were carried out in the United Kingdom for any of these offenses after the abolition of the death penalty for murder.

Nevertheless, there remained a working gallows at HMP Wandsworth, London, until 1994, which was tested every six months until 1992. This gallows is now housed in the National Justice Museum in Nottingham.

Last executions

England and in the United Kingdom: on 13 August 1964, Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, were executed for the murder of John Alan West on 7 April that year.

In 1955 Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain; for the murder of her lover David Blakely.

Scotland: Henry John Burnett, 21, on 15 August 1963 in Craiginches Prison, Aberdeen, for the murder of Seaman Thomas Guyan.

Northern Ireland: Robert McGladdery, 26, on 20 December 1961 in Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast, for the murder of Pearl Gamble.

 

Wales: Vivian Teed, 24, in Swansea on 6 May 1958, for the murder of William Williams, sub-postmaster of Fforestfach Post Office.

Last death sentences

Northern Ireland: Liam Holden in 1973 in Northern Ireland, for the capital murder of a British soldier during the Troubles. Holden was removed from the death cell in May 1973. In 2012 his conviction was quashed on appeal on the grounds that his confession was obtained by torture.

England: David Chapman, who was sentenced to hang in November 1965 for the murder of a swimming pool nightwatchman in Scarborough. He was released from prison in 1979 and later died in a car accident.

Scotland: Patrick McCarron in 1964 for shooting his wife. He killed himself in prison in 1970.

Wales: Edgar Black, who was reprieved on 6 November 1963. He had shot his wife's lover in Cardiff.

Final abolition

The Criminal Damage Act 1971 abolished the offence of arson in royal dockyards.

The Armed Forces Act 1981 abolished the death penalty for the civilian offense of spying in navy ships or bases which had been created by the Naval Discipline Act 1957.

Beheading was abolished as a method of execution for treason in 1973. Hanging, however, remained available until 30 September 1998 when, under a House of Lords amendment to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, proposed by Lord Archer of Sandwell, the death penalty was abolished for treason and piracy with violence, replacing it with a discretionary maximum sentence of life imprisonment. These were the last civilian offenses punishable by death.

On 20 May 1998 the House of Commons voted to ratify the 6th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting capital punishment except "in time of war or imminent threat of war". The last remaining provisions for the death penalty under military jurisdiction (including in wartime) were removed when section 21(5) of the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force on 9 November 1998. On 10 October 2003, effective from 1 February 2004, the UK acceded to the 13th Protocol, which prohibits the death penalty in all circumstances.

As a legacy from colonial times, several states in the West Indies still had the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the court of final appeal; although the death penalty has been retained in these states, the Privy Council would sometimes delay or deny executions. Some of these states severed links with the British court system in 2001 by transferring the responsibilities of the Privy Council to the Caribbean Court of Justice, to speed up executions.

Crown dependencies

Although not part of the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey are British Crown dependencies.

In the Channel Islands, the last death sentence was passed in 1984; the last execution in the Channel Islands was in Jersey on 9 October 1959, when Francis Joseph Huchet was hanged for murder. The Human Rights (Amendment) (Jersey) Order 2006 amends the Human Rights (Jersey) Law 2000 to give effect to the 13th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights providing for the total abolition of the death penalty. Both of these laws came into effect on 10 December 2006. Capital punishment was abolished in Guernsey in 2003, and the 13th Protocol was extended to Guernsey in April 2004. Sark (which is part of Guernsey but has its own laws) formally retained it until January 2004, when the Chief Pleas in a 14–9 vote removed it from the statutes.

The last execution on the Isle of Man took place in 1872, when John Kewish was hanged for patricide. Capital punishment was not formally abolished by Tynwald (the island's parliament) until 1993. Five persons were sentenced to death (for murder) on the Isle of Man between 1973 and 1992, although all sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The last person to be sentenced to death in the UK or its dependencies was Anthony Teare, who was convicted at the Manx Court of General Gaol Delivery in Douglas for contract murder in 1992; he was subsequently retried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994. In 2004 the 13th Protocol was adopted, with an effective date of 1 November 2006.

Overseas territories

Like the Crown dependencies, the British overseas territories are constitutionally not part of the United Kingdom. However, the British government's ultimate responsibility for good governance of the territories has led it over recent years to pursue a policy of revoking all statutory provision for the death penalty in those territories where it had up until recently been legal.

The last executions in an overseas territory, and indeed the last on British soil, took place in Bermuda in 1977, when two men, Larry Tacklyn and Erskine Burrows, were hanged for the 1973 murder of the territory's then governor, Sir Richard Sharples.

In 1991, the British government passed an Order in Council, the Caribbean Territories (Abolition of Death Penalty for Murder) Order 1991, which abolished capital punishment for murder in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The British government was unable to extend the abolition via Order in Council to Bermuda, the UK's most autonomous overseas territory with powers of almost total self-governance—but warned that if voluntary abolition was not forthcoming it would be forced to consider the unprecedented step of "whether to impose abolition by means of an Act of Parliament". As a result, the Bermudian government introduced its own domestic legislation in 1999 to rectify the problem.

Further measures were subsequently adopted to revoke technicalities in British overseas territories' domestic legislation as regards use of the death penalty for crimes of treason and piracy. In October 2002 the British government abolished the death penalty for treason and piracy in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Since then, the death penalty has been outlawed under all circumstances in all the UK's overseas territories.

Policy regarding foreign capital punishment

Under section 94 of the Extradition Act 2003, it is unlawful for an extradition of an individual to take place if the individual is accused of a capital crime, unless the Home Secretary has received assurances that the death penalty would not be applied in that case. Regardless of this, in July 2018, the Government said it will not object to the United States seeking the death penalty for two suspected British members of ISIS captured by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Although not strictly an extradition case, in response to an urgent question in Parliament on the matter, the Government stated that they still held the policy "to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances as a matter of principle".

Public support for reintroduction of capital punishment

Since the death penalty's suspension in 1965, there have been continued public and media calls for its reintroduction, particularly prompted by high-profile murder cases.

At the same time, there have been a number of miscarriages of justice since 1965 where persons convicted of murder have later had their convictions quashed on appeal and been released from prison, strengthening the argument of those who oppose the death penalty's reintroduction. These include the Birmingham Six (cleared in 1991 of planting an IRA bomb which killed 21 people in 1974), the Guildford Four (cleared in 1989 of murdering five people in another 1974 IRA bombing), Stephen Downing (a Derbyshire man who was freed in 2001 after serving 27 years for the murder of a woman in a churchyard) and Barry George (who was freed in 2007 when his conviction for the 1999 murder of TV presenter Jill Dando was quashed on appeal).

Perhaps the first high-profile murder case which sparked widespread calls for a return of the death penalty was the Moors murders trial in 1966, the year after the death penalty's suspension, in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of two children and a teenager in the Manchester area (they later confessed to a further two murders). Later in 1966, the murder of three policemen in West London also attracted widespread public support for the death penalty's return. Other subsequent high-profile cases to have sparked widespread media and public calls for the death penalty's return include "Yorkshire Ripper" Peter Sutcliffe, convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attacking seven others in the north of England; Roy Whiting, who murdered a seven-year-old girl in West Sussex in 2000; and Ian Huntley, a Cambridgeshire school caretaker who killed two 10-year-old girls in 2002.

A November 2009 television survey showed that 70% favoured reinstating the death penalty for at least one of the following crimes: armed robbery, rape, crimes related to pedophilia, terrorism, adult murder, child murder, child rape, treason, child abuse or kidnapping. However, respondents only favored capital punishment for adult murder, the polling question asked by other organisations such as Gallup, by small majorities or pluralities: overall, 51% favoured the death penalty for adult murder, while 56% in Wales did, 55% in Scotland, and only 49% in England.

In August 2011, the Internet blogger Paul Staines—who writes the political blog Guido Fawkes and heads the Restore Justice Campaign—launched an e-petition on the Downing Street website calling for the restoration of the death penalty for those convicted of the murder of children and police officers. The petition was one of several in support or opposition of capital punishment to be published by the government with the launch of its e-petitions website. Petitions attracting 100,000 signatures would prompt a parliamentary debate on a particular topic, but not necessarily lead to any Parliamentary Bills being put forward. When the petition closed on 4 February 2012 it had received 26,351 signatures in support of restoring capital punishment, but a counter-petition calling to retain the ban on capital punishment received 33,455 signatures during the same time period.

Also in August 2011, a representative survey conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion showed that 65% of Britons support reinstating the death penalty for murder in Great Britain, while 28% oppose this course of action. Men and respondents aged over 35 are more likely to endorse the change.

In March 2015 a survey by the NatCen British Social Attitudes Report showed that public support for the death penalty had dropped to 48%.

"I, personally, have always voted for the death penalty, because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only rarely. But I believe that no one should go out certain that, no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty."— Margaret Thatcher, interview with 'Aplus4', 15 October 1984

In April 2021 a poll found that 54% of Britons said they would support reinstating the death penalty for those convicted of terrorism in the UK. About a quarter (23%) of respondents said they would be opposed.