Britain and the Death Penalty
It seems as though every time the United Kingdom comes close to abolishing capital punishment, one outrage or another occurs and causes the nation to scream for vengeance. Perhaps with some forethought, a lifetime of imprisonment or solitude may be a worse punishment than the hangman’s noose or the soldier’s bullet. Regardless, the British people have typically demanded that the ultimate punishment be sanctioned when confronted with the most outrageous cases of terrorism, rape, murder or treason. These are, of course, the four principal crimes for which one can be sentenced to death in the United Kingdom; others include espionage, and in the case of Armed Forces personnel, the act of mutiny. In 1976, shortly after she took power as Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher spoke of how Britain was a nation of law and justice. She told the British people, still caught between horror, grief, and shame over the events of the previous year, “despite the actions of those who would use the barrel of a rifle to enforce their ideology, Britain is a nation of law and justice. We must always be strong-willed and impartial in the enforcements of those laws that define our society.” Though her speech was very eloquent, the enforcement of the capital punishment throughout her premiership was not; during his tenure as Home Secretary, Alan Clarke upheld the executions of no less than fifty-six people; seven of those individuals would turn out to be innocent, exonerated after the fact by DNA evidence and the recanting of eyewitness testimony.
Few people are aware of the fact that the United Kingdom came very close to abolishing the death penalty in 1965. Labour MP Sydney Silverman, a staunch abolitionist for over twenty years, introduced a private members bill to suspend the death penalty. It is considered very likely that this bill would have passed by a significant margin were it not for the events that had transpired back in February of that year. Two individuals, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, were arrested on suspicion of murder after police had found a body in their home. In a series of despicable events known as the Moors Murders, Brady and Hindley had murdered four young children in the span of two years. The public bade for blood. Silverman, who had come so close to achieving his goal, became something of a pariah after the arrests, with the tabloids indicating that he wanted the two ‘Monsters of the Moors’ to go free after a moderate prison sentence; this was, of course, a complete fabrication born of misquotes. Silverman would have been perfectly happy to see Brady and Hindley rot in prison for the remainder of their lives. The public wanted more though. In a trial that lasted two weeks, both of the suspected child-murderers were found guilty. They were sentenced to death by hanging, and this sentence was carried out soon after.
After that, however, many in Britain came to realise that the country’s capital punishment laws needed a drastic re-writing. In turn, this lead to the Serious Crimes Act 1968. The cause of abolitionism had continued to peter out after the Moors Murderers had been executed. Though there were still many who opposed capital punishment, some publicly but many more privately, a poll taken the year after those events found that over seventy percent of Britons supported the execution of serial killers and similar types of prisoners. The Serious Crimes Act clarified the use of capital punishment both for civilians and for members of the Armed Forces. Those who committed the crimes of murder, multiple rapes, sexual abuse of children, treason, espionage, and a number of terrorism-related offences, were liable to be executed. If you were a civilian, this would be done by hanging; for those in the Armed Forces, executions would be carried out by firing squad. Another amendment was made to the Serious Crimes Act regarding military crimes; the wording of the bill was changed during its second reading to ensure that the act of mutiny continued to constitute a capital crime for military personnel. The Serious Crimes Act was also written to ensure that none of the people sentenced to death would have to endure decades of waiting as happened in the United States. Civilians would have ninety days between the sentence being handed down and it being carried out. For members of the Armed Forces, this was shortened to thirty days.
There were several executions carried out during the next couple of years, none of which were particularly high-profile. Britain had always had the death penalty and so its use, even under the Serious Crimes Act, was merely a continuation of old habits and didn’t warrant all that much press attention. Several murderers and a lesser number of rapists were found guilty and hanged, causing few headlines in the major newspapers. Capital punishment only became a major issue in 1973, when IRA member Liam Holden was shot for the murder of a British soldier in Ulster. There was controversy here not because of the fact that Holden was executed, but rather because the more authoritarian sectors of British society had won an argument over whether or not Holden should have faced military or civilian justice. Holden had been detained by the British Army rather than the Royal Ulster Constabulary and held in military custody. Eventually, in compliance with new emergency regulations imposed in Ulster during the troubles, Holden faced a military tribunal for his ‘terrorist actions’ and was executed by firing squad. Allegations continue to this day that Holden was tortured into confessing to the murder of a British soldier, although no evidence has been offered to substantiate this. The debate continued as to whether terrorists should be tried in civilian or military courts in general circumstances; in Ulster, that question had been answered by the Liam Holden affair. Things were very different on the mainland.
The 1970s were a particularly bloody decade. With terrorism on the rise and, in the view of many on the right, the trade unions taking control of the country, more authoritarian segments of British society were again seen to be a playing a part in the ongoing debates being the scenes. A major terrorist attack took place in London at the end of 1975, with mortars being fired into several tourist hotspots, killing twenty-two people in total. It was this atrocity that Thatcher mentioned in her speech condoning capital punishment. Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned in 1976 due to ill-health, with his resignation taking place after the British Army had held a major anti-terrorism exercise in which troops had taken to the streets of London. This exercise had been carried out without permission from or even the knowledge of the Prime Minister. A no-confidence motion took down the Labour minority government some months later, with Thatcher’s conservatives gaining power. The British state made it its mission to crack down on terrorism. The Troubles in Northern Ireland went on throughout the 1970s and well into the 80s. Thatcher’s government was tough on crime; as mentioned before, between 1976 and 1981, Alan Clarke oversaw fifty-six executions, with the death penalty being imposed for crimes ranging from rape to terrorism. Of those executed, thirteen were shot in Ulster after facing military trials, which only lead to an increase in Republican sentiment in already restless communities.
Thatcher’s government fell in 1981 after continuing economic stagnation throughout Britain. Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party took power once again and there were some within the party who wanted to move to abolish the death penalty. The necessary support for that to happen just wasn’t there though. Large segments of both the public and Parliament favoured the continuation of capital punishment. Without a means of actually abolishing the death penalty, Kinnock’s government instead chose to put a ‘temporary freeze on the Serious Crimes Act. This wasn’t the end for the death penalty in Britain, but it was a major victory for the abolitionists. No more executions would be carried out during Kinnock’s tenure as Prime Minister; unfortunately for those few people who had been sentenced to death before Kinnock had come to power and had their death sentences suspended, Labour wouldn’t be in power forever. When the Conservatives won the 1987 general election, those thirteen sentences which had until now been suspended were carried out, and capital punishment returned. However, the Tory government worked with Labour opposition benches to bring an end to the increasingly draconian anti-terrorism laws that had been continuously passed throughout the past two decades. Those laws that allowed for terrorists to be convicted in military courts were repealed, meaning that no civilians would face military justice in Britain.
Public support for the death penalty was ultimately increased by the tragic events of December 14th 1988. Pan-Am Flight 103 was blown up by a bomb over Glasgow, killing a total of 319 people, including many civilians on the ground. A long investigation with much cooperation between MI5, Special Branch and the FBI would eventually pinpoint the culprit, a Libyan by the name of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who was believed to be in the employee of the Libyan intelligence services. In 1992, the al-Megrahi would face justice. The Libyan government under Colonel Gaddafi refused to extradite him after the British government announced hawkishly that it would be seeking the death penalty. In a bold operation orchestrated at the highest levels of British government, SAS commandos infiltrated Libya and abducted al-Megrahi, taking him to a submarine off of the Libyan coast and eventually back to Great Britain, where he would be charged with 319 counts of murder. He was found guilty later that year and hanged in the spring of 1993. The use of capital punishment slowed dramatically after that, with few judges actually issuing the death penalty and instead choosing to hand down whole life sentences. That didn’t mean that it had been abolished, however.
In 1994, the next executions would take place. For the first time in many years, those charged would be shot rather than hanged as military personnel. A trio of British soldiers, Allan Ford, Justin Fowler, and Geoffrey Parnell, kidnapped, raped and then murdered a Dutch tour guide while stationed in Cyprus. Each of the three soldiers was found guilty of all three crimes; they all new when the verdict had been issued that there was only one sentence that awaited them. It was all done in a very ‘British’ way. Thirty days after being sentenced, the three murderers were lead outside from the isolation wing of the military prison at Colchester, and were put up against a wall at the end of a firing range. A dawn sky hung over them. They were even allowed a smoke before the sentence was carried out. Despite pleas and even a few protests from anti-capital punishment campaigners, gunshots rang out and the three soldiers were executed.
Those executions in 1994, and the earlier one in 1993, had set the precedent that capital punishment would only be used in exceptionally grave circumstances where the crime was so heinous that public safety and moral justice demanded that capital punishment be handed down to the perpetrators. An attempt by the Labour government in 1999 to abolish capital punishment in all circumstances by making the European Convention on Human Rights part of British law failed to pass its first reading, although it did have some support. The terrorist atrocities seen throughout the 70s and 80s, along with the public knowledge of the heinous crimes committed by people such as Ford and al-Megrahi just wouldn’t face from the consciousness of the British people. Four executions have taken place in Great Britain since 1994.
The first was in 2009, when gang member Sean Mercer was hanged ninety days after being found guilty of the murder of a nine-year-old boy in Liverpool. The public nature of the crime and Mercer’s total lack of remorse was what caused the judge to have him executed; besides this, it was an attempt by the government crackdown hard on gang violence by publicly showing the consequences for even young offenders who took part in gangland murders. The second person to be executed was serial rapist John Worboys. The so-called ‘Black Cab Rapist’ had been found guilty of sexual offences against no less than twelve women in 2009. He was hanged, like Mercer, ninety days after his conviction. There was more controversy here as Worboys had not actually committed any murders, but the sentence was upheld and he was hanged too. Finally, Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo were convicted of the murder of a British soldier on the streets of London in 2013. The fact that this was a terrorism related crime meant that Adebowale and Adebolajo were executed by hanging last year, in 2014.
As of the date of writing, these two offenders were last people to be executed under British law. However, Prime Minister Gove’s government has promised that British Jihadi’s returning from the battlefields of Iraq, Jordan, and Syria will be charged with treason, as the British Armed Forces are currently involved in combat operations in all three countries. When asked if this would mean the government sought the death penalty, Home Secretary Amber Rudd offered no comment.
