Capital punishment is not “barbaric”, it is necessary justice

Within the past fortnight, we have seen contrasting demonstrations both of the totalitarian ruthlessness of the contemporary British state, in one set of circumstances, and of its abject impotence, in another.

The first, abusive exercise of power was exhibited when seven West Yorkshire police officers invaded a private house and dragged a terrified autistic teenage girl from a cupboard where she was cowering, to spend twenty hours in police cells; the second, pathetic demonstration of powerlessness was the revelation that the court that had convicted mass murderer Lucy Letby did not have the authority to compel her to return to the dock to receive her sentence in public.

Bereaved parents were denied the closure of witnessing the murderer of their children being confronted, in the face of the entire community, with the punitive consequences of her crimes. A trial that had featured heartbreaking evidence of multiple tragedies ended with the undignified farce of a judge pronouncing a sentence on three empty chairs. “The court has no power to force her to attend,” said Mr Justice Goss, the judge. “Therefore, there is nothing I can do about it.”

Apparently, in this instance, it was not possible to send seven thuggish police officers down to the cells to drag Letby up into the dock. But, of course, Letby is guilty and therefore guaranteed the utmost consideration from our inverted justice system, whereas the girl in Yorkshire was innocent of any actual offence and therefore vulnerable to the most brutal treatment by the supposed forces of law and order. That is how far, in Britain today, the legal system has been perverted to protect the guilty – ludicrously perceived in liberal orthodoxy as victims – while intervening ever more aggressively and intrusively against the rights of innocent citizens, even within the former sanctuary of their own homes.

“The court has no power…” Yet there was another, more fundamental, sense in which the court was powerless. Mr Justice Goss did not have the power, entrusted to British judges for centuries, of donning the black cap and sentencing Lucy Letby to death, as she richly deserved. The man representing the solemnity of the law did not possess the power of life and death which Letby not only owned, but exercised successfully seven times and unsuccessfully six times, though other cases are under investigation.

Could anything more effectively illustrate the extent to which power in our society has leached away from legitimate authority, from the morally responsible elements, into the hands of the corrupt, the malevolent and the delinquent? Every thug armed with a knife or a gun, bloodying the streets of our cities, casually carries in his pocket the capital sanction that is denied to our highest judges. Such a moral imbalance can only have one outcome: the domination of society by evil.

Whenever some extreme instance of murder shocks even our morally comatose society into outrage, as has happened with the Letby case, we go through a well-rehearsed ritual, carefully choreographed by the liberal establishment, of “reigniting the debate on capital punishment”. It is a well-organised system for providing a safety valve for public concern, allowing calls for the return of the death penalty to be voiced in the initial stages, followed by a now predictable rota of misleading statistics, moral repudiation by the usual suspects via such outlets as the BBC and the Guardian, and the caricaturing of those opposing abolitionist orthodoxy.

“Medieval” and “barbaric” are two of the most tired epithets employed by the self-righteous guardians of the carnage they characterise, in the spirit of Roy Jenkins, as “a civilised society”. Their historical illiteracy does not permit them to recognise the oxymoron implied by their twinning of those two adjectives. The climax of this exercise is the triumphant production of an opinion survey showing that a substantial majority of the public is opposed to the death penalty, so it would be undemocratic, as well as unrealistic, to consider restoring it. Q.E.D.

That increasingly perfunctory and obsolete narrative is a hangover from the methods by which, in the 1960s, the deeply flawed and massively unpopular abolitionist settlement was imposed on Britain. Those methods were soon extended to many other social issues – abortion in 1967 and mass immigration in 1968 – so that the history of the capital punishment controversy has a significance far beyond the immediate topic.

Very few people are aware of the history of capital punishment. The majority blindly accept the “progressive” fantasy of a remote past in which much of the population was routinely executed, tapering away, year by year, through increasing “enlightenment”, to the point where the gallows became a museum piece.

In reality, the heyday of capital punishment for trivial offences was the “enlightened” 18^th century, under the Whig Oligarchy (the Tories were out of power for 69 years, from 1714 to 1783, an experience they are about to revisit), which extravagantly extended the death penalty. One statute alone, in 1723, created 50 new capital crimes around theft and poaching. The gallows also awaited the perpetrators of some 220 offences, ranging from “blacking the face or using a disguise whilst committing a crime” to stealing goods to the value of twelve pence, or “strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7-14”.

Of course, many people have hostile feelings against “blackface” today, but the most significant feature of this blueprint for a merciless police state is that it was created by Whigs, the supposed progressives of their day, spouting rhetoric about the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 having secured the liberties of Britons, before heading off on the Grand Tour (they were Remainers before their time) to wallow in the spirit of the “Enlightenment” and lionise Voltaire and Rousseau. The hypocrisy of progressives is one of the reassuring constants of modern history.

The leader of the movement to abolish capital punishment in Britain in the 1960s was Sydney Silverman, MP. He introduced a private member’s bill (a classic tactic to deflect criticism from the government), the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill, in 1965. In a further weasel manoeuvre, the proposal was not for outright abolition, but to “suspend” capital punishment for five years and then review the situation. Some of Silverman’s remarks were a classic example of liberal double-speak, in a style to which we have since become wearily accustomed.

“To those who are a little, in my opinion, over-sensitive to what is, I think, quite mistakenly thought to be public opinion – I say this… parliament must take its own responsibility. In exercising that responsibility, we in Parliament must be very conscious that we are responsible to those who send us here and must answer to them for what we do here. This is what we are not merely ready but anxious to do. But that does not mean that we must subordinate our judgment, still less that we must distort our consciences, in order to do something we believe to be wrong because if we do not we might lose a vote or even an election.”

Translated into plain English, that word salad means: I am going through the motions of respecting my constituents and public opinion which, though I choose to pretend otherwise, is fiercely opposed to my legislation and I am claiming credit for being brave, though I know I have neutralised the risk because Tory MPs have similarly compromised themselves with their constituents.

Public opinion was indeed opposed to abolition. An NOP survey in November, 1964 had found just over 65 per cent in favour of retaining capital punishment, with 21 per cent supporting abolition. Another poll one month later showed 67 per cent in favour of the death penalty and 26 per cent favouring abolition. By July, 1965 the Gallup Poll showed public opinion favoured retention over abolition by a margin of three to one. The House of Commons responded by passing the Bill by a vote of 200-98, which suggests massive cowardice in a House of 630 members.

In the event, as public opposition increased rather than diminished, the Government did not wait until the end of the five-year suspension, but moved for outright abolition in 1969. As the then Home Secretary James Callaghan explained: “I knew that I would find it extremely difficult, if not impossible to fulfil my responsibilities if a case of hanging was likely to come before me when the five-year period ended.” Instead of taking the proper course for an inadequate home secretary by resigning, Callaghan persuaded Harold Wilson to enact permanent abolition.

Callaghan’s most telling observation was: “In retrospect, I think what decided me was when I learned that the leaders of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party would both be likely to support immediate abolition.” The political class had made the intoxicating discovery that, if it united across party lines, it could defy the will of the British public with impunity. It used that device to overrule the public on mass immigration, enacting laws against free speech, inventing “hate” crime, creating “protected characteristics” and “aggravated offences” to end equality under the law and produce the travesty of a justice system we have today.

Public opinion since 1965 has remained stubbornly in favour of capital punishment, but it does not seem so, because of the liberal establishment and media’s cherry-picking of statistics. Take the most recent opinion poll as an example: last month a YouGov poll appeared to show 47 per cent of respondents opposed to the restoration of capital punishment, with just 33 per cent in favour. But that, as headlined, was totally misleading.

That was because the survey question read “for all murder”, a situation that did not apply even in 1965, since the crime of murder had been divided into categories of “capital” and “non-capital” in the 1950s. By 1965 only five categories of murder attracted the death penalty and the public accepted that. A more detailed YouGov poll last year found a similar division of opinion on reintroducing capital punishment for all murders (48 per cent opposed, 34 per cent in favour), but when more specific categories were considered, the death penalty for child murder was supported by 52 per cent to 35 per cent, for multiple murder by 55 per cent to 32 per cent, and for terrorist murder by 54 per cent to 34 per cent.

This demonstrates that, after 58 years, the public has still not reconciled itself to the 1965 declaration by Parliament of open season on the population whose protection is its primary duty. Over that period the homicide rate in England and Wales has increased from 325 in 1965 to 602 in 2022-23. Allowing for the increase in population, the rise can be expressed as 7 homicides per million people in 1970 to 10.1 per million today.

In the first decade of this century, 29 murders were committed by previous killers released from prison: capital punishment would have saved those 29 lives and many others in preceding and subsequent decades. Abolitionists like to cite the cases of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley, as innocent men executed; but modern forensic investigation and familiarity with the phenomenon of false confessions, plus the high standard of proof of guilt that would be attached to any restoration of the death penalty, would eliminate such miscarriages of justice.

The equation is that many more lives would be saved and the minimal risk of a miscarriage of justice would be so vanishingly small that anyone deterred by it should not drive a car because of the higher risk of killing a pedestrian.

The increase in homicides since abolition testifies to the deterrent effect of capital punishment. The death penalty is not “barbaric” unless it is exacted for a crime other than murder or treason. On the contrary, it testifies to society’s respect for innocent human life by reserving the capital penalty for those who unlawfully take the lives of others.

The inability of the state to punish Lucy Letby for murdering seven vulnerable children by the forfeit of her own life confronts us with an uncomfortable reality: behind all the liberal verbiage, the law is implicitly telling the bereaved parents that the murderer’s life is of more value, in the eyes of a liberal society, than their children’s. It is an intolerant, amoral affront to human decency. It is also a reminder that we live in a parliamentary democracy and, as Sydney Silverman understood, the parliamentary element exists to negate the democracy.

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