ABSTRACT

By 1964, capital punishment and its abolition had become one of the great unresolved questions of British politics. It aroused tumultuous passions on both sides of the argument despite its peripherality to the mainstream of political debate. The issue had surfaced time and again both inside and outside Parliament since the early nineteenth century, and the scope of the death penalty had been steadily narrowed to the point where it was in operation, effectively, only for the offence of murder, and even then only for certain types of murder. The status quo was embodied in the Homicide Act of 1957, which retained hanging as the penalty for five types of murder (capital murder), whilst for other classes of murder the penalty was life imprisonment. In the Act, ‘capital murder’ was murder: (a) committed in the course or furtherance of theft; (b) committed by shooting or causing an explosion; (c) committed to effect an escape from lawful custody; (d) of a police officer in the execution of his duty; or (e) of a prison officer in the execution of his duty. It was also a capital offence to have been convicted of committing murder on more than one occasion.