Capital punishment in the United Kingdom

Capital punishment in the United Kingdom predates the formation of the UK, having been used in Britain and Ireland from ancient times until the second half of the 20th century.

The last executions in the United Kingdom were by hanging, and took place in 1964; capital punishment for murder was suspended in 1965 and finally abolished in 1969 (1973 in Northern Ireland).

[2] In Elizabethan England, the death penalty applied for treason, murder, manslaughter, infanticide, rape, arson, grand larceny (theft of goods worth more than a shilling), highway robbery, buggery, sodomy and heresy.

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.

c. 94 to c. 100) further reduced the number of civilian capital crimes in England and Wales to five: murder, treason, espionage, arson in royal dockyards, and piracy with violence; there were other offences under military law.

[17] Relevant offences, which were obsolete or for which lesser punishments had long applied in practice,[11] included theft furtum grave;[18] robbery or stouthrief;[19] piracy;[20] breaking into houses or ships;[21] destroying ships;[22] fire raising;[23] certain classes of malicious mischief;[24] beating and cursing parents;[25] hamesucken;[26] aggravated rape;[27] abduction;[28] returning to Scotland after banishment for performing a marriage without banns;[29] incest;[30] sodomy;[31] and bestiality.

The last known execution by the civilian courts of a person under 18 was that of Charles Dobell, 17, hanged at Maidstone together with his accomplice William Gower, 18, in January 1889.

Harold Wilkins, at 16 years old, was the last juvenile sentenced to the death penalty in the United Kingdom, in 1932 for a sexually related murder, but he was reprieved due to age.

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 1911 over such an unpopular issue.

The commission's report discussed a number of alternatives to execution by hanging (including the electric chair, gas inhalation, lethal injection, shooting, and the guillotine), but rejected them.

[citation needed] The public had by then expressed great dissatisfaction with the verdict in the case of Timothy Evans, who was tried and hanged in 1950 for murdering his infant daughter.

[39][40] In 1965 the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, who had committed himself to the cause of abolition for longer than 20 years, introduced a Private Member's Bill to suspend the death penalty for murder.

[44] The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 suspended the death penalty in Great Britain (but not in Northern Ireland) for murder for a period of five years, and substituted a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment; it further provided that if, before the expiry of the five-year suspension, each House of Parliament passed a resolution to make the effect of the Act permanent, then it would become permanent.

Northern Ireland: Robert McGladdery, 26, on 20 December 1961 in Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast, for the murder of Pearl Gamble.

The last remaining provisions for the death penalty under military jurisdiction (including in wartime) were removed when section 21(5) of the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force on 9 November 1998.

Sark (which is part of Guernsey but has its own laws) formally retained it until January 2004, when the Chief Pleas in a 14–9 vote removed it from the statutes.

[72] Further measures were subsequently adopted to revoke technicalities in British overseas territories' domestic legislation as regards use of the death penalty for crimes of treason and piracy.

[82] Other subsequent high-profile cases to have sparked widespread media and public calls for the death penalty's return include "Yorkshire Ripper" Peter Sutcliffe, convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attacking seven others in the north of England;[83] Roy Whiting, who murdered a seven-year-old girl in West Sussex in 2000;[84] and Ian Huntley, a Cambridgeshire school caretaker who killed two 10-year-old girls in 2002.

[90] Also in August 2011, a representative survey conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion showed that 65% of Britons support reinstating the death penalty for murder in Great Britain, while 28% oppose this course of action.

[91] In March 2015 a survey by the NatCen British Social Attitudes Report showed that public support for the death penalty had dropped to 48%.

[93] After Royal Assent for the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965, supporters in Parliament have made several attempts to reintroduce capital punishment.

On 23 November 1966, Duncan Sandys was refused leave to bring in a Bill to restore capital punishment for the murder of police or prison officers, by a vote of 170 to 292.

[98] A year later, Ivan Lawrence's motion "That this House demands capital punishment for terrorist offences causing death" was rejected by 232 to 361.

After the Conservatives' victory in the 1979 general election, Eldon Griffiths (Parliamentary adviser to the Police Federation of England and Wales) moved a motion "that the sentence of capital punishment should again be available to the courts" on 19 July 1979.

[102] Later in the same Parliament, the Criminal Justice Bill provided an opportunity on 11 May 1982 for several new clauses to be proposed which would have reinstated capital punishment.

The first, which simply declared that "A person convicted of murder shall be liable to capital punishment", was tabled by Edward Gardner, and rejected by 195 to 357.

[103] It was followed by an alternative under which capital punishment would be available "as the penalty for an act of terrorism involving the loss of human life"; this new clause was rejected by 176 to 332.

[106] Finally, a new clause allowing capital punishment "as the penalty for murder in the course of robbery and burglary which involves the use of offensive weapons" was rejected by 151 to 331.

[115] A Parliamentary debate on a question proposing reintroduction of capital punishment came on 21 February 1994 when new clauses to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill were moved.

[118] In June 2013 a new bill for capital punishment in England and Wales was introduced, sponsored by Conservative MP Philip Hollobone.