More About Murder
Evidence of considerable interest continues to be given before the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, all of it so far against the proposal to abolish the capital penalty. It must be assumed that witnesses who are of another opinion will be heard in due course. The Chief Constables, Prison Governors, and Prison Chaplains who have appeared before the Commission, together with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the Police Super- intendents' Control Committee and the Prison Officers' Association, are opposed to the complete abolition of the death penalty, though
some believe that a distinction should be drawn between murder committed under some sudden impulse and the "cold and calcu- lated" crime. The question is who should draw the distinction. There is little or no support for the degrees-of-murder method followed in the United States ; the Judges are not believed to desire freedom to impose a term of imprisonment instead of the statutory death sentence ; the idea of the review of a death sentence by a panel of jurists appears to find little favour. There is general agreement, on the contrary, that the present system of review by the Home Secretary is more satisfactory than any alternative is likely to be. Two points in the evidence are worthy of note—the convic- tion expressed by more than one witness that after an imprisonment of more than about ten years hopelessness and definite moral deterioration sets in ; and the suggestion that the time has come to revise in the light of the latest medical knowledge the McNaghten Rules framed by the Judges in 1843 for guidance as to the bearing of a murderer's mental state on the verdict. There can be no doubt about the wisdom of this.
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