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Our dedication to the death penalty

Half a century on from its abolition, why is capital punishment still so popular?

Almost 50 years ago a Labour MP, Sidney Silverman, proposed a bill that would cease all state executions in Britain. The last death sentences were carried out on Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans on 13 August 1964. But before Silverman's historic bill – and ever since – a majority of the British public has consistently supported capital punishment. A YouGov survey in 2010 showed that 51% would back the reintroduction of the death penalty, with only 37% committed to its abolition.

The abolition of the death penalty was part of a wider series of liberal reforms passed in parliament with cross-party support from the late 1960s onwards. The legalisation of abortion and decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 helped shape modern Britain. Harold Wilson's government would set the standard for equality with the Equal Pay Act (1970), the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) and the Race Relations Act (1976). But whereas most people support these initiatives, the argument about whether the state should be able to execute its citizens still divides us. Less than a year after Silverman's bill was passed, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were arrested for the Moors murders and public opinion favoured their execution.

So why, after half a century without state executions, are most people not convinced? One reason could be the public's expectation that the law should act on their behalf. The Telegraph's Simon Heffer told me for the Crime and Punishment – The Story of Capital Punishment documentary that, for the most serious homicides, in the "interest of maintaining confidence in the rule of law the only appropriate punishment is the death penalty".

He cites the cases of murderers convicted of the most heinous crimes, where torture, rape and ultimately murder were premeditated against children or the very old. The public would appear to back this view. When Ian Huntley was arrested for the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, a YouGov poll showed that 63% of respondents believed Huntley should be executed by the state. The tabloid press also stirs up public frustration with stories of reoffending sex attackers and murderers enjoying a comfortable prison term. And while the tabloids don't support the reintroduction of the death penalty in their editorial pages, they do allow their high-profile columnists to call for the return of the noose.

Professor Robert Blecker from the New York Law School believes that citizens have the right to expect that the state will deliver retribution on their behalf – and indeed that the state has an obligation to do so. Blecker cites Kant to argue that even a civilised state has "a moral imperative and a duty" to act and that if you break society's rules by committing murder then as "a responsible agent, you've chosen to do what you did, then you deserve to die for it".

Opponents to capital punishment, like Geoffrey Robertson QC, argue that it is "much worse for an individual to spend the rest of their life in prison than to be executed immediately". But most of the public don't share his faith in the prison system. It was the Victorians who first introduced the idea of imprisonment as an alternative to execution. This was part of a liberal reforming agenda, which sought a more proportional sense of punishment. As a consequence, conviction rates rose as juries became more likely to convict. The penal system has been used since to maintain the public's faith in the law. After abolition those convicted of murder received a mandatory life sentence and in 1983 the whole life tariff was introduced, meaning some prisoners would never be released. But while convicted murderers spend considerably longer in prison today than they did before the death penalty was abolished, it's questionable whether in cases like the Soham murders the public are convinced that prison is a satisfactory alternative.

But what about miscarriages of justice, like the case of Derek Bentley, who was posthumously pardoned four decades after being hung? Michael Mansfield QC believes that the ultimate sanction "can't be applied in a flawed system of justice". Mansfield represented both the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, all of whom would almost certainly have been executed had Britain retained capital punishment. The former home secretary Michael Howard admits these cases changed his mind on the death penalty. "I accepted that you could never completely eliminate the chance of a mistake and since then I have been averse to the idea of the state deliberately taking someone's life."

During the 1980s and early 1990s a free vote was held every year in parliament on the reintroduction of capital punishment. One MP who always voted in favour of a return of the death penalty was Ann Widdecombe, a former prisons minister, who argues that "during the height of the IRA outrages, there was a strong moral case for saying a moral deterrent is available" and that only the death penalty could provide this.

This defence has been put forward since the era of the Bloody Code in the 18th century, when over 200 offences – including stealing a rabbit or keeping the company of gypsies – carried the death sentence. Until 1868 executions were carried out in public in front of drunken and baying crowds and it was expected that the public would attend to witness justice being carried out. Professor Vic Gatrell of Cambridge University, author of The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, explains that this public spectacle was designed as a visual show of the state's power and to "testify to the anger of the king". But this was before the Victorians established a penal system and a police force. And after decades of research the contention that the death penalty is a deterrent in countries that still enforce it, like the US and China, has not been proved either way.

Capital punishment was only fully removed from British statutes under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998: until this time it had been technically possible to be executed by the state for treason or piracy. As long as Britain remains committed to its human rights legislation, it will never reintroduce capital punishment, and all the major political parties oppose it. Abolition was led by MPs who considered it a moral issue and would not be swayed by public opinion. But with the public still largely unconvinced, one wonders whether they would maintain their opposition now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...alty-abolition