THE DECISIVE STEP
WE should, as soon as possible,' wrote William Temple in the Spectator over twenty years ago, 'remove the death penalty for murder from the statute book.' We are still some way from doing that. The large hanging section of the popular press has already shown that it will do all it can to whip up the fears of the public. On Monday it was quite unable to conceal its pleasure that a murder had been committed shortly after the House of Commons vote. 'Murder within three days,' gloated the Daily Express. 'First "I cannot hang" murder,' sang the Daily Mail. No one thought of pointing out that about 130 murders are committed in this country each year so that on an average there is a murder every three days. Similar tactics were pursued when there was a campaign to bring back flogging. Crimes of violence were strewn all over the front pages of the papers, and most people learned with surprise that there had in fact been a fall in the number of crimes that had previously been punishable by flogging.
A more serious if less dangerous obstacle in the way of abolition than the gutter press is, of course, the House of Lords. The Lords have in the past been accustomed to defeat measures of penal reform two or more times, and they have so far defeated the abolition of the death penalty for murder only once. But the House of Lords is likely to wither away unless the Labour Party co-operates in reforming it, and this aid would not be encouraged by the Lords throwing out an abolition bill. For this reason and because Lord Salisbury presumably does not desire a clash between Lords and Commons, he will probably try to restrain the backwoodsmen from descending upon the House in force to defeat the Bill. Last week's vote was probably the decisive step.
Although the debate began with an admirable speech by Mr. Lloyd George, it was not very enlightening. Mr. Lloyd George and others demanded a quite unattainable degree of proof that abolition was the right course. It is impossible for that to be proved as conclusively as Pythagoras's Theorem can be proved, but in no other field of politics is such a degree of proof demanded. There is however a great deal of evidence and it all points the same way. As Mr. Gerald Gardiner, QC, shows in his brilliant book Capital Punishment as a Deterrent and the Alternative (Gollancz, 6s.), which should be read by all who think that the House of Commons came to the wrong decision last week, capital punishment has been abolished in this country for two hundred offences without increasing the rate of crime and it has been abolished in many other countries for murder without altering the murder rate. It is pretty clear that there can be no more evidence on this matter, and those who refuse to accept the experience of other countries in abolishing the death penalty for murder and the experience of this country in abolishing it for other offences are therefore saying they will not accept any empirical evidence whatsoever.
Sir Ernest Gowers, whose experience as Chairman of the Royal Commission converted him to the abolitionist side, in his distinguished book A Life for a Life (Chatto and Windus, 7s. 6d.), quotes extensively from the speeches of the Law Lords in 1948. These are a depressing reminder of what we are doubtless soon about to hear. Mr. Gardiner. QC, having cited many of the occasions when the Judges have been ludi- crously wrong in the past, says 'The Judges never see those who are deterred. . . . and there is nothing in the training or Court experience of Judges . . . which enables them any better than the reader to know what are those things in the hearts and minds of men and women which deter them from committing criminal offences.' That is true. Judges are civilised and clever men who are worth hearing on every subject, but their opinion on questions of deterrence is no more and no less valuable than that of diplomats or dentists.
It is a pity that these two books were not published before last week's debate. If they had, we might have been spared Mr. Butler's fantasies about the alternative to hanging being `a slow death and a lingering execution . . . something infinitely more cruel than capital punishment itself.' Though there was little enough excuse for these remarks even before these books appeared, both Mr. Gardiner and Sir Ernest Gowers show that the problem of the alternative to capital punishment is not an exceptionally difficult one.
Archbishop Temple was perhaps not exaggerating when he ended his article in the Spectator with the words : 'To me at least it seems clear that few public actions would at the present time so much demonstrate and secure an advance in the ethics of civilisation as the abolition of the death penalty.'
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