ABSTRACT

Chapter 7. The clause in the 1948 Act which sucked all the oxygen out of the air, and came close to wrecking the entire measure, was the one to abolish the death penalty. One of the great political puzzles of the twentieth century is “why the practice of the death penalty persisted, in defiance of all rationality and humanity?” The Labour Party had long aspired to get rid of the hanging judge; a majority Labour government would surely deliver on the promise. This was to underestimate the strength of the retributive counter-attack launched against any attempt to dispense with capital punishment, particularly from the ranks of the judiciary, the bishops, and Conservative members of the House of Lords. In the face of this counter-attack, the Labour government backed down, withdrew the clause to abolish the death penalty from the 1948 measure, after trying unsuccessfully to build consensus around the notion of degrees of murder, and fell back upon the appointment of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. Abolition was expressly not within the Commission’s remit. The Commission implicitly concluded that there were no ways of limiting the liability to capital punishment short of outright abolition. Yet, the “sacred hierarchy” of judges and bishops had made it clear in evidence to the royal commission that abolition would be firmly resisted. Abolitionist sentiment was revived, however, in the mid-fifties by three executions—Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley, and Ruth Ellis—and by the work of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment.