Everything about Capital Punishment In The United Kingdom totally explained
Capital punishment was applied
in the United Kingdom and, before the union, its constituent countries.
The death penalty for murder was suspended in 1965 and abolished in 1969, but remained on the statute book, although never applied, for certain other offences until 1998.
Origins in English law
Hanging by the neck until dead as form of
capital punishment was introduced to
England by the
Anglo-Saxon invaders of the
5th century. By the
10th century it had become a common method of execution.
William I of England decreed that hanging should only be used for conspirators or in times of war and ordered that criminals should instead be blinded and emasculated.
Waltheof II, Earl of Northumbria was the only lord to be formally executed during his reign.
William Rufus re-introduced hanging but only for those found guilty of poaching royal deer. He too is known to have executed only a single aristocrat,
William of Aldrie.
Henry I brought hanging back as the main means of execution for many crimes.
William Fitz Osbern was the first recorded execution at
Tyburn in
1196. The hanging tree (near present-day
Speakers' Corner in
Hyde Park) became notorious.
Under the reign of
Henry VIII some 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed by various methods including
boiling,
burning at the stake,
decapitation and hanging, sometimes with the added punishment of
drawing and quartering while still alive.
Sir
Samuel Romilly speaking to the
House of Commons on capital punishment in 1810, declared that "…[thereis] 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 different crimes punishable by death. These crimes included such offences as "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 to protect the property of the wealthy classes that emerged during the first half of the eighteenth century; a notable example being the
Black Act of 1723 which created fifty capital offences for various acts of theft and poaching.
Whilst executions for
murder,
burglary and
robbery were common, the death sentences of minor offenders were often not carried out. However, children were commonly executed for such minor crimes as stealing. 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, 35,000 death sentences were handed down in England and Wales, but only 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. Since the death penalty was mandatory (although it was frequently
commuted by the government), the
Judgement of Death Act 1823 gave judges the power to commute the death penalty for all capital crimes except
treason and
murder. The Punishment of Death, etc. Act 1832 reduced the number of capital crimes by two-thirds.
Gibbeting was abolished in 1832 and hanging in chains was abolished in 1834. In 1861, several acts of Parliament (24 & 25 Vict; c. 94 to c. 100) further reduced the number of civilian capital crimes to five:
murder,
treason,
espionage,
arson in royal dockyards, and
piracy with violence; there were other offences under
military law. The death penalty remained
mandatory for treason and murder, unless
commuted.
The
Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (
1864–
66) concluded (with one dissenter) that there wasn't a case for abolition but did recommend an end to public executions and this proposal was included in the Capital Punishment (Amendment) Act 1868. From then executions on the island of Great Britain were carried out in prison. The practice of beheading and quartering executed traitors was stopped in 1870.
In 1885
John 'Babbacombe' Lee was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang though he maintained that he was innocent. On
February 23 at Exeter prison, three attempts were made to carry out his execution, all of which failed (because when the gallows had been reassembled in the new shed the draw bar was misaligned by one eighth of an inch; thus one of the hinges of the trap caught on the bar and failed to drop - see Home Office documents on the affair). As a result, Home Secretary Sir
William Harcourt commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Lee continued to petition successive Home Secretaries and was finally released from gaol in 1907, having become notorious as
the man they couldn't hang.
Juveniles under 16 could no longer be executed from
1908 with the
Children's Charter. 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), and in
1933 the minimum age for capital punishment was raised to 18 with the
Children and Young Persons Act 1933. The last known execution of a person under 18 years of age was that of Charles Dobel, 17, hanged at
Maidstone together with his accomplice William Gower, 18, in January
1889.
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 and to everyone's surprise was adopted by a majority in the House of Commons (245 in favour to 222 against). In the
House of Lords the abolition clause was defeated but the remainder of the bill was passed. 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 Acts over such an unpopular issue.
Instead, the
Home Secretary,
James Chuter Ede, 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 US methods of electrocution and gassing, and the then-theoretical lethal injection), 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 on this issue. Whilst the report recommended abolition from an ethical standpoint, it made no mention of possible miscarriages of justice. It concluded that unless there was overwhelming public support in favour of abolition, the death penalty should be retained.
Between 1900 and 1949, 621 men and 11 women were executed in England and Wales. Thirteen
German agents were executed during the Second World War. The
Treachery Act 1940 was the only law in the twentieth century to create a new capital offence in civilian law.
By 1957 a number of controversial cases had highlighted the issue of capital punishment once again. Campaigners for abolition were partially rewarded with the
Homicide Act 1957. The Act brought in a distinction between capital and non-capital homicide. Only six categories of murder were now punishable by execution. They were:
- Murder in the course or furtherance of theft
- Murder by shooting or causing an explosion
- Murder while resisting arrest or during an escape
- Murder of a police officer
- Murder 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.
Abolition
Murder
In 1965 the
Labour MP
Sydney Silverman, who had committed himself to the cause of abolition for more than 20 years, introduced a
private member's bill, which was passed on a free vote in the House of Commons by 200 votes to 98. (A
free vote, traditional for issues of conscience such as abortion and capital punishment, is one in which the political parties don't direct MPs how to vote.) The bill was subsequently passed by the House of Lords by 204 votes to 104.
The
Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965 suspended the death penalty in
England,
Wales and
Scotland (but not
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
18 December 1969, and a similar motion was carried in the Lords in the same month. The death penalty for murder was abolished in Northern Ireland under the
Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973.
After abolition of the death penalty for murder, die-hards began a tradition requiring the Commons to hold a free vote on a motion during each Parliament proposing the restoration of capital punishment. This motion was always defeated. However, the death penalty still survived for other crimes, namely:
causing a fire or explosion in a naval dockyard, ship, magazine or warehouse (until 1971);
espionage (until 1981);
piracy with violence (until 1998),
treason (until 1998), and
certain purely military offences under the jurisdiction of the armed forces, such as mutiny (until 1998).(External Link
)
However, no more executions were carried out under UK law.
Last executions
On 13 August 1964 at 9 a.m. Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, were each executed for the murder of John Alan West on 7 April that year. These were the last executions in England and in the United Kingdom.
The last execution in Scotland was of 21 year old Henry John Burnett on 15 August 1963 in Craiginches Prison, Aberdeen, for the murder of seaman Thomas Guyan.
The last execution in Northern Ireland was of Robert McGladdery, 25, on 20 December 1961 in Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast, for the murder of Pearl Gamble.
The last execution to take place in Wales was of murderer Vivian Teed, hanged in Swansea on 6 May 1958.
The last woman to be executed in the UK was Ruth Ellis on 13 July 1955.
Last death sentences
The last person to be sentenced to death in the United Kingdom was William 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.
The last person sentenced to death in England was David Chapman, who was sentenced to hang in November 1965 for the capital murder of a swimming-pool night-watchman in Scarborough. He was released from prison in 1979 and later died in a car accident.
The last person to be sentenced to death in Scotland was Patrick McCarron in 1964 for fatally shooting his wife. He hanged himself in prison in 1970.
The last person to be sentenced to death in Wales was Edgar Black, who was reprieved on 6 November 1963. He had fatally shot his wife's lover in Cardiff.
Final abolition
The Criminal Damage Act 1971 abolished the offence of arson in royal dockyards.
The Naval Discipline Act 1957 reduced the scope of capital espionage from "all spies for the enemy" to spies on naval ships or bases. Later, the Armed Forces Act 1981 abolished the death penalty for espionage.(External Link) (In 1911 the Official Secrets Act had created another offence of espionage which carried a maximum sentence of fourteen years.)
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 offences punishable with 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. The UK later (10 October 2003; effective from 1 February 2004) acceded to the 13th Protocol, which prohibits the death penalty under all circumstances, so that the UK may no longer legislate to restore the death penalty while it's subject to the Convention.
As a legacy from colonial times, several islands 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 islands, the Privy Council would sometimes delay or deny executions. Some of these islands severed links with the British court system in 2001 in order 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; however, the last execution in the Channel Islands was in Jersey on 9 October 1959, when Francis Joseph Hutchet 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. The 13th Protocol was extended to Guernsey in April 2004.
The last execution on the Isle of Man took place in 1872. Nevertheless, capital punishment wasn't 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 dependancies was Anthony Teare, who was convicted at the Manx Court of General Gaol Delivery in Douglas 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.
Notable executions
Note: This list doesn't include the beheadings of nobility.
1305: William Wallace, Scottish resistance fighter, was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason.
1499: Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the throne, was hanged at Tyburn.
1606: On 31 January the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605 were hanged, drawn and quartered.
1612: Edward Wightman became the last person in England to be burnt at the stake for heresy, at Lichfield.
1660: At the English Restoration nine regicides were hanged, drawn and quartered for their part in the death of King Charles I. Also John Bradshaw, Oliver Cromwell, and Henry Ireton were posthumously executed: disinterred from Westminster Abbey and hanged, drawn, and quartered.
1681: Oliver Plunkett was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on July 1 1681, becoming the last Catholic martyr to die in England.
1684: Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles and Susanna Edwards became the last people to be hanged for witchcraft in Britain.
1708: Michael Hammond, aged 7, and his sister, aged 11, were reputedly hanged at Lynn for felony. If true, Michael would have been the youngest person ever to suffer the death penalty in Britain.
1724: Jack Sheppard, house-breaker, was hanged at Tyburn for burglary on 16 November after four successful escape attempts from jail. His partner-in-crime, highwayman Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, was similarly executed for the same burglary five days earlier.
1725: Jonathan Wild, criminal overlord and fraudulent "Thief Taker General", was hanged at Tyburn on May 24 (over six months after Jack Sheppard's and Blueskin's executions) for receiving stolen good and thus actually aiding criminals.
1739: Dick Turpin, highwayman, was hanged.
1746: Nine Catholic members of the Manchester Regiment, Jacobites, were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason on Wednesday July 30, 1746 at Kennington Common (now Kennington Park).
1750: James MacLaine, 'The Gentleman Highwayman', was hanged at Tyburn, London
1757: John Byng became the only British admiral ever executed (by firing squad) by the Royal Navy. His crime was to have failed to "do his utmost" during the Battle of Minorca.
1760: Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers was executed at Tyburn on 5 May for the murder of a servant. He is the only peer to have been hanged for murder.
1789: Catherine Murphy was the last woman to be burned to death (legally) in England. The penalty was abolished the next year.
1820: Andrew Hardie and John Baird were hanged and beheaded at Stirling after being tried for their part in the Radical War in Scotland.
1828: William Corder was hanged at Bury St Edmunds on August 11 for the murder of Maria Marten at the Red Barn a year before.
1861: Martin Doyle became the last person to be hanged for attempted murder at Chester on the 27 August.
1868: Frances Kidder became the last woman to be hanged in public on 2 April.
1868: Michael Barrett was executed on 26 May at Newgate Prison for the Fenian bombing at Clerkenwell, the last public hanging in Britain.
1910: Hawley Harvey Crippen was hanged on 23 November in London's Pentonville Prison for the murder of his wife.
1914: Private Thomas Highgate was executed by firing squad on 8 September, the first British soldier to be executed for desertion during the World War I.
1916: Roger Casement was hanged at Pentonville on 3 August for treason as one of the 7 leaders of the failed Irish Easter Rising.
1920: Private James Daly of the Connaught Rangers was shot for mutiny on 2 November in India, the last member of the British Armed Forces to be executed for mutiny.
1923: Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were hanged simultaneously on 9 January in London's Holloway and Pentonville Prisons respectively. The case was controversial because Thompson didn't directly participate in the murder for which she was hanged.
1941: Josef Jakobs was executed by firing-squad on 15 August, the last execution in the Tower of London.
1946: William Joyce, better known as "Lord Haw-Haw", was hanged for treason on 3 January in London's Wandsworth Prison. He was actually an American citizen, not British, but was convicted of treason because, as the holder of a British passport (albeit one fraudulently obtained), he was held to have owed allegiance to the British sovereign. Theodore Schurch, hanged for treachery the next day, was the last person to be executed for an offence other than murder; he was executed at Pentonville. As a member of the armed forces he'd been tried by court-martial.
1947: Walter Rowland was hanged in Manchester on 27 February for the murder of Olive Balchin despite maintaining his innocence. While he'd been awaiting execution, another man confessed to the crime. A Home Office report dismissed the latter's confession as a fake, but in 1951 he attacked another woman and was found guilty but insane.
1949: Margaret Allen, aged 43, was hanged on 12 January for killing a 70-year-old woman in the course of a robbery, the first woman to be hanged in Britain for 12 years.
1949: John George Haigh, the "acid-bath murderer", was executed at Wandsworth on 10 August.
1950: Timothy Evans was hanged on 9 March at Pentonville for the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine at 10 Rillington Place, north-west London. He had also initially claimed to have killed his wife, but later withdrew the claim. A fellow inhabitant at the same address, John Christie, later found to be a sexual serial killer, gave key evidence against Evans. Christie was executed in 1953 for the murder of his own wife. Evans received a posthumous pardon in 1966. In 2004 the Court of Appeal refused to consider overturning the conviction due to the costs and resources that would be involved. See 10 Rillington Place.
1950: George Kelly was hanged at Liverpool on 28 March for murder, but had his conviction quashed posthumously by the Court of Appeal in June 2003.
1952: Edward Devlin and Alfred Burns were executed on 25 April for killing a woman during a robbery in Liverpool. They claimed that they'd been doing a different burglary in Manchester, and others involved in the crime supported this. A Home Office report rejected this evidence. Huge crowds gathered outside Liverpool's Walton Prison as they were executed.
1952: Mahmood Hussein Mattan, a Somali seaman, was hanged on 3 September in Cardiff for murder. The Court of Appeal quashed his conviction posthumously in 1998 after hearing that crucial evidence implicating another Somali was withheld at his trial.
1953: Derek Bentley was executed on 28 January at Wandsworth prison as an accomplice to the murder of a police officer by his 16-year-old friend Christopher Craig. Craig, a minor, wasn't executed and instead served 10 years. Derek Bentley was granted a posthumous pardon on 29 July 1993. The Court of Appeal overturned his conviction on 30 July 1998.
1953: John Reginald Halliday Christie was executed on 15 July at Pentonville for the murder of his wife Ethel.
1954: Styllou Christofi, aged 53, penultimate woman executed by Britain on 13 December.
1955: Ruth Ellis, aged 28, was executed on 13 July, the 15th, youngest, and last woman to be hanged in Britain in the 20th century.
1959: Guenther Podola was executed on 5 November 1959, the last person to be hanged for the murder of a policeman.
1960: Francis Forsyth was hanged on 10 November, the last 18-year-old to be executed in Britain; Anthony Joseph Miller, 19, was hanged in Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison on 22 December 1960, the last teenager to be executed in Britain.
1961: Robert McGladdery, 25, was hanged on 20 December in Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast, the last person to be executed in Northern Ireland, for the murder of Pearl Gamble in Newry.
1962: James Hanratty was executed at Bedford on 4 April after a controversial rape-murder trial. In 2002 Hanratty's body was exhumed and the Court of Appeal upheld his conviction after Hanratty's DNA was linked to crime scene samples.
1963: Henry Burnett, aged 21, was executed on 15 August at Craiginches Prison in Aberdeen for the murder of seaman Thomas Guyan, the last hanging in Scotland.
1964: Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, were executed on 13 August at 9 a.m. for the murder of John Alan West, the last people executed in Britain (External Link).Further Information
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