W HEN capital punishment was being debated in 1948, Parliament was
said to be divided into the 'Drips' and the 'Drops.' The 'Drips' were the alleged sentimentalists who shrank from hanging as a revolt- ing and unnecessary anachronism. The 'Drops' were the alleged hard-headed realists who, though they did not like the apparatus of rope and drop, were convinced that hanging was a necessary evil. But if to be sentimental is to be guided by feeling rather than by reason or evidence, then it may be argued that it is the 'Drops' who were the sentimentalists.
The position has been slightly clarified since 1948, and two arguments that were then used could not be used in this week's debate, at least with any plausibility. In 1948 Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, as he then was, speaking with infinite weight of the possibility of an innocent man being hanged, said : 'The Honourable and learned Member asks me to say that there is no possibility. Of course, a jury might go wrong, the Court of Criminal Appeal might go wrong, .as might the ' House of Lords and the Home Secretary; they might all be stricken mad and go wrong. But that is not a possibility which anyone can consider likely. The Honourable and learned Member is moving in a realm of fantasy when he makes that suggestion.'
When the cases of Norman Thorne, Mrs. :Thompson and others are recalled, that seems to be a rash statement to make, even in 1948. Such a remark now would be merely foolish. Less than two years after Sir David's speech, Timothy John Evans was executed after a trial in which the chief prose- cution witness had been John Reginald Halliday Christie, who lived at the same house as Evans in Rillington Place, and who was three years later himself executed. Christie is reckoned to have murdered at least seven people, and at the time he was giving evidence against Evans there were already four of his victims interred at Rillington Place. As Evans was executed, we shall never know whether he was or was uot a murderer. All that can be said is that it seems an unlikely coincidence that two stranglers of women should have been living in the same house, and that a man should be rightly convicted largely on the evidence of one who had already himself committed a similar crime four times. If there is a case for believing Evans guilty, that case was not made out by the Scott Henderson Reports or by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe in the House of Commons. No fault can be found with the Home Secretary of the time, Mr. Chuter Ede, or with the judges or with anybody else involved in the case. In 1950 Evans looked plainly guilty. But the fact remains that, putting derers who deserve it. The duty of deciding who should be reprieved is a heavy one, and no one doubts that our Home Secretaries carry out their terrible task with all possible care and trouble. Those who bear such a responsibility should not be criticised lightly, but the last three holders of the office have all made decisions that seem open to serious criticism. Two months ago -Mr. Lloyd-George refused to reprieve Mrs. Christofi, even though the prison doctor thought that she was insane. It is a little difficult to see how the Home Secretary can have been sure of Mrs. Christofi's sanity, no matter how many doctors were called in—and he called in several—when the prison doctor, after he had had her under his supervision for two months, considered that she'16s insane. belief in its value as a deterrent. When asked why they think it is a deterrent, they will have to rely, as they have always had to rely, solely upon fervent professions of faith. They have no evidence to support them; indeed, they have the evidence of thirty-six other states to refute them. As Lord Templewood, a former Home Secretary, has written: 'The experiment of the thirty-six abolitionist states clearly shows that abolition does not increase the number of murders.'
If abolition in these thirty-six states has not increased the number of murders, why should abolition increase the murder rate in England? The 'Drops' must tell us in what respects England differs from these other countries, and in what respects Englishmen are more bloodthirsty, unmanageable and cruel than, say, the Dutch, the Venezuelans, the Nepalese or the men from Travancore. Plainly they are unable to dot so, and equally plainly there is no reason to think that abolition in England would have any effect on the murder rate. There is no intellectual basis whatever for believing that the death penalty is a better deterrent than alternative forms of punishment for murder. Those who believe that it is a special deterrent do so without evidence. Their belief in capital punishment is sentimental.
It may seem perverse in an issue of the Spectator which is largely devoted to the possible slaughter of millions to worry about the killing of roiwhly a dozen men a year, but un- necessary killing is wrong. And hanging is unnecessary. It is deplorable. that the Government should not have decided to end what the late Mr. Wilson Harris. at that time editor of this journal, speaking in the House, called 'judicial barbarism.'
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