Murder is not a party game
this issue of the SPECTATOR goes to ess it is uncertain whether or not the ouse of Lords will be successful in its tempt to frustrate the Government's Ian to bounce Parliament into a prema- e permanent abolition of the death ,nalty for murder. What is clear, how- or. is that it would be fully justified in doing.
1\ hen the present five-year experimen- 1 suspension of the death penalty was Iroduced by the present Government 1965, after a free vote, it was the ear and explicit intention of Parlia- ent that no decision should be made hether or not to perpetuate the suspen- on indefinitely until the full five years d elapsed—that is, on 31 July next ear. It was also assumed that Parliament ,uld then make up its mind only after full and informed discussion of the atistical and other experience of the receding lustrum. The Home Secre- R's attempt to rush the decision -ough on the eve of the Christmas .ess, with a minimum of discussion tl on the basis of inadequate evidence, id more than six months before its due J te. is a clear and unequivocal contempt he conventions of parliamentary de- cracy—of a kind that has become all characteristic of the present Govern- ent in general and of its gerrymandering one Secretary in particular.
Some dedicated abolitionists have tempted to whitewash Mr Callaghan the grounds that he is engaged in e necessary political activity of doing by stealth. In fact, the reverse is case. Had the Government waited fil the five-year experiment had run course in July 1970, it is more than ely that permanent abolition would ye been approved by both Houses. her all, there was a comfortable major- in the Upper House for the original Cl in 1965, and by next summer back- oods retentionists would have lacked e excuse that Mr Callaghan has now ven them for overruling the will of e elected chamber expressed in a free e. And the public would not then have en able to claim that a measure about hich it has strong feelings, and to which IS overwhelmingly opposed, had been Plemented by trickery and deceit. The Government's own excuse is that, bringing the matter forward now, it Preventing hanging from becoming an e in the next general election. In fact, Mr Heath has all along made it clear that he would in no event make capital punishment a plank of the official Con- servative election platform. Equally, how- ever, there will inevitably be some Con- servative candidates—and possibly some Labour ones as well—who will include the call to reintroduce hanging as part of their own personal appeal to the voters. But this will happen whatever Parliament collec- tively decides. Indeed, if the peers do decide to reject the Government's manoeu- vre, the issue will be more firmly thrown into the cockpit of popular politics than it ever would have been had the Home Secretary decided to play it straight.
The truth is that the Government has decided to bring forward the hanging debate before its due time, and to con- clude it with as little discussion as pos- sible, simply in the hope that its own de facto responsibility for permanent aboli- tion may largely be forgotten by the time the election comes. In other words it wishes to defy what all the polls show to be the overwhelming weight of public opinion on this issue, not openly or by attempting to change public opinion. but by hurriedly sweeping the issue under the carpet and trusting in the passage of time and public forgetfulness to do the rest. To its contempt of the rules of parliamentary democracy, the Govern- ment has added a contempt for public opinion. Mr Callaghan may be accused by his detractors of cowardice, or even praised by his admirers for his prudence: the one thine he cannot be convicted of is being motivated by high moral prin- ciple.
And what of the substantive issue itself? The figures published so far, both by the Home Office and in the Morris/ Blom-Cooper report (which the Home Office attempted to suppress) do not prove conclusively either that hanging is or is not a more effective deterrent to murder than a long term of imprison- ment. The probability is that there is. in fact, a small class of murderers or poten- tial murderers for whom the death penalty has a special deterrent effect. Moreover, it is open to the retentionists to argue that this effect would have been more pronounced had the ultimate deterrent been more frequently used. With only two or three executions a year—the nor- mal pattern in the period immediately preceding the 1965 Act—the calculating killer Could know that, whatever the law said, the chances of his actually ending on the scaffold were very slight indeed. The real argument for abolition lies, not in this area, but in the- fact that murder in Britain is, happily. a minor problem (whether in the context of violent crime in general or compared with other causes of avoidable sudden death), that the death penalty is obnoxious in itself and that a mistake is irrevocable.
The Government is now attempting to argue that, if abolition is not made per- manent, the situation will have to revert to that obtaining under the 1957 Act, with its unsatisfactory distinction between capital and non-capital murders. This is nonsense.
Whatever happens. there is no ques- tion of the 1957 Act returning to fill the vacuum before next August. and between now and then the Government has ample opportunity to introduce new legislation which could well retain the death penalty for a 'second offence', if only to meet the understandable case of the prison officers who are obliged to guard murderers serving a life sentence with, otherwise, 'nothing to lose'.
But a more sensible course at the present time would clearly be a straight- forward extension of the experimental period. This would enable further and more reliable figures to be gathered. It would satisfy all reasonable abolitionists without alienating the general public. Above all it would enable the dangerous gap between politicians and the people on this issue to be bridged.
For the public's strong support for capital punishment (over 80 per cent in favour, according to recent polls) is based primarily not on any assessment of its proven efficacy as a deterrent to murder, nor on a simple, atavistic desire for retribution. It is rather that there is an instinctive popular feeling that the rein- troduction of the death penalty may do something to halt the appalling rise in crimes of violence (particularly those involving firearms) in general. It is not enough for governments and -experts to point out that there is not a shred of evidence to support this view. If the gulf between politicians and the public is to be narrowed, and an ugly backlash averted, the politicians must show their determination to provide, in place of the symbol of the death penalty, a genuine answer to what is a genuine and rapidly worsening problem.
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