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Capital punishment in the United Kingdom, now abolished, has a long history, from before the United Kingdom existed.

Origins

Hanging by the neck as form of capital punishment was introduced to Great Britain by the Anglo-Saxon invaders of the fifth century. By the tenth century it had become a common method of execution. William the Conqueror decreed that hanging should only be used for conspirators or in times of war and ordered that criminals should instead be castrated and have their eyes put out.

William Rufus re-introduced hanging but only for those found guilty of poaching royal deer. Henry I brought hanging back as the main means of execution for many crimes. The first recorded execution at the notorious Tyburn hanging tree (now Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park) was in 1196.

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, beheading and hanging with perhaps the added punishment of drawing and quartering.

Sir Samuel Romilly speaking to the House of Commons on capital punishment in 1810, declared that "..is no country on the face of the earth in which there * been so many different offences according to law to be punished with death as in England." Known as the "Bloody Code", at its height some 220 different crimes were 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*. Many believed the situation to be a farce.

Reform

In 1808 Romilly had the death penalty removed from pickpocketing and other trivial offences and started reform that continued over the next 50 years. The Punishment of Death Act 1832 reduced the number of capital crimes by two-thirds. Gibbeting (the public display of executed corpses) was abolished in 1843. In 1861, the Criminal Law Consolidation Act further reduced the number of capital crimes to four: murder, treason, arson in royal dockyards, and piracy with violence. The death penalty was mandatory for treason and murder, although subject to the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (i.e. the government could commute death sentences). This was less than in many U.S. states, where killing was retained for kidnapping and rape.

The Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1864-1866) concluded (with one dissenter) that there was not a case for abolition but did recommend an end to public executions and this proposal was included in the Capital Punishment (Amendment) Act of 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. The last public execution was that of Joseph Philip Le Brun, killed on Jersey on 11 August 1875; the last execution on Jersey occurred in 1959 but the death sentence was last imposed on 17 May 1984, on Denis James Boreham (subsequently commuted). The last execution on the Isle of Man was that of John Kewish, hanged at Castletown on 1 August 1872, but the sentence was last imposed on 10 July 1992, on Anthony Teare. (Teare was retried in 1994, by which time the penalty had been abolished.)*

In 1885, John 'Babbacombe' Lee was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang though he maintained that he was innocent. However, on February 23 at Exeter prison, three attempts were made to carry out his execution, all ending in failure (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. In 1922 a new offence of Infanticide was introduced replacing 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 and the minimum age for capital punishment was raised to 18 in 1933.

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 unexpectedly adopted by a majority in the House of Commons (245 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 Act over such an unpopular issue. The Home Secretary set up a new royal commission (the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949–1953) instead 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 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 extend the scope of the death penalty.

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
  • Two murders committed on different occasions (if both done in Great Britain).

The police and the government were of the opinion that death penalty deterred offenders from carrying firearms and it was for this reason that such offences remained punishable by death. However, it was hard for many to see the logic of making a burglar who murders with a gun face the death penalty and allowing a rapist who murders with a knife to avoid it.

Abolition

In 1965 the Labour MP Sydney Silverman who had committed himself to the cause of abolition for more than 20 years proposed a Private Member's Bill on abolition 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 party whips do not issue directions to MPs. It was subsequently adopted by the House of Lords by 204 to 104 against. The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act suspended the death penalty in England, Wales and Scotland for murder for a period of five years. In 1969 the act came up for renewal and the then Home Secretary, James Callaghan proposed a motion to remove the five year limit which was carried by both houses on December 18, 1969. The death penalty survived for other crimes, 1) treason, 2) piracy with violence, 3) causing a fire or explosion in a naval dockyard, magazine or warehouse, and 4) certain crimes under the jurisdiction of the armed forces (although no more executions were carried out under UK law).

In 1973 the death penalty was abolished in Northern Ireland under the Northern Ireland (Emergency Powers) Act.

After abolition, it became a tradition for Parliament to hold a free vote on a motion proposing the restoration of capital punishment in each session. This motion was always defeated. The Criminal Damage Act 1971 abolished the offence of arson etc. in a naval dockyard. Under a House of Lords amendment to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 the death penalty was abolished for crimes of treason and piracy with violence. On May 20 1998, the House of Commons voted to implement the 6th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights outlawing capital punishment for murder except "in times of war or imminent threat of war". The last remaining provisions for the death penalty under military jurisdiction (including in wartime) were removed when the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force in November 1998. When the 6th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights was ratified on 20 May 1999 all provisions for the death penalty in peacetime were prohibited (although they had all been abolished by this time). The UK later (October 10, 2003) acceded to the 13th Protocol, which prohibits the death penalty under all circumstances.

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 last appeal; though 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 *.

Notable executions

Note: This list does not include the beheadings of nobility.

1499: Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the throne, hanged at Tyburn
1606: On 31 January the gunpowder plotters of 1605 are hanged, drawn and quartered.
1612: The last person in England to be burnt at the stake for heresy was Edward Wightman 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
1686: Alice Molland becomes the last person to be hanged for witchcraft in Britain.
1739: Dick Turpin, Highwayman, hanged.
1746: The execution for treason of nine Catholic members of the Manchester Regiment, Jacobites, who were hanged, drawn and quartered on Wednesday July 30th 1746 at Kennington Common (now Kennington Park)
1760: Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers is 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 is the last woman to be burned to death (legally) in England. The penalty is abolished the next year.
1861: Martin Doyle is the last to be hanged for attempted murder, at Chester on the 27 August.
1868: On 2 April Frances Kidder becomes the last woman to be hanged in public.
1868: On 26 May the last public hanging in Britain takes place at Newgate Prison as Michael Barrett is executed for the Fenian bombing at Clerkenwell.
1910: On 23 November, Hawley Harvey Crippen is hanged in London's Pentonville Prison for the murder of his wife.
1916: Roger Casement is hanged at Pentonville on 3 August for treason.
1923: On 9 January, Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters are hanged simultaneously in London's Holloway and Pentonville Prisons respectively. The case was controversial for the fact that Thompson did not directly participate in the murder for which she was hanged.
1941: on 15 August the last execution in the Tower of London takes place; Josef Jakobs is shot by firing-squad for treachery.
1946: On 3 January William Joyce, better known as "Lord Haw-Haw", is hanged for treason in London's Wandsworth Prison. Theodore Schurch, hanged for treachery the next day, is the last person to be executed for an offence other than murder; he was executed at Pentonville although, as a serviceman, he was tried by court martial.
1947: On 27 February, Walter Rowland is hanged at Manchester for the murder of Olive Balchin after consistently maintaining his innocence. While he had been awaiting execution, another man had confessed to the crime. A Home Office report dismissed his confession as a fake, but in 1951 this man attacked another woman and was found guilty but insane.
1949: On 12 January, Margaret Allen, a 43 yr old spinster who killed a 70 yr old woman in the course of a robbery, becomes the first woman to be hanged in Britain for 12 years.
1949: John George Haigh, the "acid-bath murderer", is executed at Wandsworth on 10 August.
1950: Timothy Evans is hanged on 9 March at Pentonville for the murder of his baby daughter at 10 Rillington Place, north-west London. He had also confessed to killing his wife. 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 quashing the conviction due to the costs and resources that would be involved. See the article on 10 Rillington Place.
1950: George Kelly, who was hanged at Liverpool on 28 March of this year for murder, had his conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal in June 2003.
1952: Edward Devlin and Alfred Burns are executed on 25 April for killing a woman during a robbery. They claimed that they had 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, is hanged on 3 September in Cardiff for murder. The Court of Appeal quashes his conviction in 1998 after hearing that crucial evidence implicating another Somali as the most likely culprit was withheld at his trial.
1953: On 28 January Derek Bentley is executed at Wandsworth prison as an accomplice to the murder of a police officer by his 16 year old friend Christopher Craig. Craig as a minor was not executed and instead served 10 years. Derek Bentley was granted a posthumous pardon on July 29 1993. This did not prevent the Court of Appeal from reconsidering his case, and his conviction was overturned on 30 July 1998.
1953: On 15 July John Reginald Halliday Christie is executed at Pentonville for the murder of his wife Ethel.
1955: On 13 July Ruth Ellis (28) becomes the 15th, and youngest woman to be hanged in Britain in the 20th century, and last woman to be hanged in Britain.
1960: On 10 November Francis Forsyth becomes the last 18-year old to be hanged in Britain (the last teenager to be executed was Anthony Joseph Miller, 19, in Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison on 22 December 1960).
1961: On December 20, Robert McGladdery is hanged 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 is executed at Bedford on 4 April after a controversial rape-murder trial. In 2002, following his family's efforts to have his conviction overturned, Hanratty's body is exhumed and his DNA compared with samples found at the crime scene. However, the Court of Appeal upholds his conviction after forensic scientists link Hanratty's DNA to the crime scene samples.
1963: On 15th of August the last hanging in Scotland was that of 21 year old Henry Burnett, who was executed at Craiginches Prison in Aberdeen for the murder of seaman Thomas Guyan.
1964: On 13 August at 8am Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, are both executed for the murder of John Alan West becoming the last persons executed in Britain *.

See also

External links

British executions | History of the United Kingdom | Capital punishment by country | Penal system in the United Kingdom

 

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