ABSTRACT
Capital punishment is the most severe penalty available to the courts, and it conveys something of how judges, policy-makers and politicians view the standing of crime, criminals and criminal justice; make sense of their role and powers; and establish the mood, morals and mores of the nation. Executions had once been the most public, brutal and theatrical of punishments in England and Wales, their ceremonial and cruel character having grown in tandem with the emergence of a centralised, weak state that sought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to be seen to impress its will directly on the felon and on the audience that witnessed the death. Almost as important, and in the wake of the Great War, there was a closely coupled campaign to moderate or eradicate the passing of death sentences by military courts. Parallel campaigning continued to be directed at the imposition of the death penalty in civilian courts.
