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Reprieves, the curse of the system? |
Background.
The concept of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, i.e. reprieving people who
had been sentenced to death, dates back a very long way in English law. We were
all subjects of the reigning monarch and only he or she had the power of life
or death over us prior to 1837. The monarch sat with the Privy Council and
disposed of capital cases up to then for those convicted of felonies, other
than murder for which reprieves were very rare prior to the early 1800’s. In
In the years up to 1838, there were many crimes which carried a mandatory death
sentence and because of that, there had to be a means of stopping the wholesale
judicial slaughter of minor criminals, if only to prevent a revolution.
(Excessive and cruel punishments were a major cause of the French Revolution)
An amazing 11,305 death sentences were passed in the decade 1826-1835 alone,
interestingly only 154 of these being for murder. Just 514 (4.54%) were carried
out. The next decade saw a sharp decline in both death sentences and
executions.
The table below shows the situation as it progresses through the 19th
century.
|
|
1800 - 1834 |
1835 - 1864 |
1865 - 1899 |
|||
|
Sentenced to death |
29808 |
851.66 p/a |
3014 |
100.47 p/a |
898 |
25.66 p/a |
|
Hanged for Murder |
523 |
14.9 p/a |
336 |
57.9% of sentenced |
485 |
54% of sentenced |
|
For other crimes |
2153 |
61.5 p/a |
27 |
1.1% of sentenced |
0 |
0 |
|
Total hanged |
2676 |
- |
363 |
- |
485 |
0 |
|
Reprieved |
27132 |
91.03% |
2651 |
90.54% |
413 |
46% |
You will see that after 1835 the execution rate remained fairly stable and
averaged 11.2 per annum for the rest of the century, as the number of capital
crimes had been dramatically reduced between 1812 and 1834. In practice, only
murderers were sentenced to death after 1861. During the 19th century, the
population had risen from 9 million to 24 million.
Could one really justify the public hanging of a young mother who had
stolen food (shoplifted) to feed her starving children? But it was the law, she
had to be sentenced to death. Thus the monarch, sitting with the Privy Council
and in some cases judges themselves, could commute the death sentences of those
who they didn't feel deserved them. From 1861, only four crimes continued to
attract the death sentence, but hanging remained the mandatory sentence for
those convicted of murder. Murder is generally seen as the most heinous crime a
person can commit, but many of those sentenced to hang for it were reprieved
where the murder was considered to be less heinous or where there were
mitigating circumstances.
The 20th century.
In the first 58 years of the 20th century, everyone convicted of murder
was still automatically sentenced to death. This situation was slightly
modified by The Homicide Act of 1957 (see later). In the 66 years in England
and Wales, where the death sentence could still be passed, 1,485 people were
sentenced to be hanged by civil courts for murder and 755 were actually
executed. The remainder, effectively half of all these, were reprieved (49.2%
in total). 1,340 men were to hear the dread words of the death sentence and 741
of them were subsequently hanged, equating to 55.3%. In the case of women, 145
were sentenced to death but only 14 hanged, a reprieve rate of just over 90%.
(Louisa Masset was hanged in 1900 but sentenced to death in 1899 and is
excluded from these statistics.) Click here to see a
graph showing the trends.
In the condemned cell.
One can imagine the emotional torture of being sentenced to death and transferred
to the Condemned Cell. The light is on 24/7 and you are guarded round the clock
by teams of two or three warders.
You are weighed regularly and will probably realise why - so that they can
calculate the correct length of drop for you when the time comes. Your date
with the hangman has been set - normally for a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday,
three weeks hence. Until the Governor comes to you and tells you that you have
either been reprieved or not, you live in a constant state of anxiety and fear.
Not knowing one's fate can be harder to cope with than actually knowing and
being able to prepare oneself for it.
I have no doubt too that a lot of those sentenced to death thought that being
hanged would still be death by slow strangulation. That it wasn't is almost
irrelevant - if that was how they perceived it. When prisoners were reprieved,
they had often to be transferred to the prison hospital for a time to recover
from their emotional problems and shock before they could be put into the
normal prison population.
An oft overlooked fact is the stress on the warders of having to take
part in the death watch process. Typically a total of 8 to 10 men (or women, if
the prisoner was female) would have worked eight hour shifts in the condemned
cell. They had to try and occupy their prisoner and to the extent they were
allowed to, comfort them and prevent them committing suicide. It was also their
duty to record everything the prisoner said, in case of a confession or partial
admission of guilt or the emergence of some new piece of evidence. Even where
they may have personally strongly expected a reprieve, they could not let the
prisoner know this and had to act at all times on the basis that their charge
would be hanged. Once the Home Secretary's decision was known, it was these
warders who had to deal with the prisoner's emotions - particularly when they
had just been told by the Governor that there was to be no reprieve and that
they were to be hanged in a few days’ time. Where there was a reprieve, it
often came only a day or two before the set execution date.
The public perception.
Now look at the situation from the point of view of the ordinary member
of the public who read a newspaper every day or listened carefully to the news
on the wireless (as radio was known then). They would know of a trial for
murder (they were much shorter then and much more fully reported) and hear of
the guilty verdict and the death sentence. And yet time and time again they
would hear of a reprieve. What message did this send? A system in chaos, or
that couldn't make its mind up? Or a situation in which the penalty for murder
probably wouldn't really be death? The public's perception is, in reality, far
more important than the actual and often well hidden facts. If the death
penalty is supposed to deter, it must be seen to be carried out in all those
instances where the crime warrants it, save in the most exceptional
circumstances. Where there were genuine reasons for a reprieve, these should
have been clearly stated by the Home Office so that the ordinary person could
have understood them. This was not the case and the reasons for reprieving or
not reprieving were Official Secrets.
We do know that people were hanged despite widespread public concern
over their level of guilt, e.g. Edith Thompson and Derek Bentley. In Edith
Thompson's case, it is rumoured that the Home Office felt that she had tried to
murder her husband previously and this was one of the reasons that she was not
reprieved. If the Home Office had such information, why was it not made public?
Based upon the information in the public domain at the time, her execution
seemed unjust to most people. It is hard to justify Derek Bentley's hanging by
any way of looking at it. Have a look at the full stories of these cases and
see what you think (Edith
Thompson & Derek
Bentley).
Most people have a strong and innate sense of justice. They have little
sympathy for child killers and multiple murderers and, certainly in the early
part of the 20th century, supported the execution of "worst"
murderers. But they strongly opposed the hanging of people they saw as being
guilty of far less dreadful crimes. I think that this is still true today.
There is often discussion of capital punishment in the media and by the public
following particularly horrific murders. The Home Office never seemed capable
of understanding public opinion and allowed executions, such as Derek Bentley's
on purely technical grounds, while reprieving other people for apparently the
flimsiest of reasons.
I am sure you will agree that there is a huge difference between being
hanged by the neck until you are dead and serving 10 years in prison which was
the average for those who were reprieved between 1900 and 1964. This difference
seemed to be totally lost on the Home Office however. Few of those reprieved
served more than 15 years of their "life sentences" actually in
prison. It is thought that no one served more than 20 years. Elizabeth Maude
Jones, who with her boyfriend was convicted of a very nasty robbery/murder,
served just nine years of hers and that is not atypical. Even Donald Thomas,
who shot dead a police officer in London in 1948, served only 14 years. The
length of time served was a particularly relevant factor where, as was often
the case, the condemned person was quite young and had a great deal of
potential life in front of them. The average age of all of those sentenced to
death in the 20th century was 33 years. It could be argued that death is less
cruel than spending the rest of one's life in prison which the term
"life" sentence would imply and as happens in America, which has life
without parole, as an option to the death penalty in most states. This is also
the punishment for those who have death sentences commuted there.
The reprieve process.
Although the trial judge had, by law, to pass the death sentence if the jury
found the prisoner guilty, he was able to make a recommendation to the Home
Secretary as to whether it should be carried out. Where a trial judge
recommended mercy, it was rarely ignored by the Home Office. In evidence to the
Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949-1953), it was stated that there
were only six occasions between 1900 and 1949 when the judge's recommendation
to mercy was overruled. Between 1900-1949 there were 137 reprieves where the
judge disagreed with the jury's recommendation to mercy.
It was not at all unusual for the jury to add a recommendation to mercy to
their guilty verdict but this was, in reality, often irrelevant to the final outcome. According to the Royal Commission on Capital
Punishment, Table 1 for
From 1907 prisoners had the right of appeal against their conviction for
murder, but not against their death sentence. This appeal process ran in
parallel to the Home Office process outlined below. If they won their appeal,
their murder conviction was quashed. They were either freed or had their
conviction reduced from murder to a lesser offence, e.g., manslaughter.
The Home Office received the case papers after the trial, together with
the recommendation of the judge. Its officials began to prepare a report for
consideration by the Permanent Secretary and the Home Secretary. It was normal
for the prisoner to be examined by a panel of three Home Office psychiatrists
to determine if they were legally sane and competent to be hanged. This
psychiatric report was also sent to the Permanent Secretary and considered along
with the rest of the case papers. We can only surmise how decisions were
reached in individual cases and what advice was given to the Home Secretary, as
the reasons for reprieving or not reprieving a prisoner were always kept
secret. We can again only surmise as to the criteria Home Office officials used
in making their decisions. It would seem that murder by poisoning or the use of
a gun were seen as aggravating factors, as were loose sexual morals in the case
of female prisoners. Age could be a mitigating factor, especially in the case
of females. Physical injury or disability were also mitigating factors where
they might lead to problems with the execution. Any sign of mental illness
after sentence had been passed was usually a reason for reprieve. However,
obvious mental problems could not save the likes of John Christie who murdered
seven women in the face of overwhelming public opinion. I am not trying to
impugn the actions of individual civil servants in individual cases - I am sure
that they acted in good faith and in accordance with the guidelines set down
for them. But taken in the round, the system was clearly unsatisfactory.
If there was to be no reprieve, the Home Secretary would write "the law
must take its course" on the file and the execution would then proceed,
otherwise the Home Secretary would exercise the Royal Prerogative of Mercy on
behalf of the monarch. This total lack of transparency in the system was always
a cause of problems and laid the Home Office wide open to accusations of injustice.
Women and the death penalty.
Between 1829 and 1899, 231 women were sentenced to hang in the British
Isles including Ireland. 101 of these women were executed, 97 for murder, one
for attempted murder, one for conspiracy to murder (in Ireland) and two for
arson. Three women were found insane and respited to Bedlam or Broadmoor. One
was given a free pardon and one committed suicide in the condemned cell. Over
the period, the reprieve rate was 56.3%. From 1861 to 1899, there were to be
119 women given the death sentence of which 28 were to be hanged (all for
murder) giving a reprieve rate of 73.5%.
As stated earlier, 145 women were sentenced to death for murder in
England and Wales in the 20th century (two others were sentenced to death for
espionage and both were reprieved).
Of these 145, no fewer than 131 were reprieved (90.3%) and only 14 hanged. This
raises the obvious question - why were so many women sentenced to death if
there was no intention of carrying out their sentences. One can, to a point, understand
the unwillingness of a male dominated judicial system to execute women, except
for the most dreadful crimes, but this was not what happened in practice.
There are at least 55 instances of women who murdered their infant
children being sentenced to death and then reprieved. I am willing to accept
that these women actually killed their children and so were, in that sense
guilty, but few people felt that these, often desperate, young women deserved
to die for their crime and indeed no woman was to hang for murdering her own
infant in the 20th century. The last execution for this crime took place in
1849. Yet it wasn't until 1938, with an amendment to the Infanticide Act of
1922, that the law finally caught up with practice and
public opinion and understood post-natal depression and the stigmatisation
caused to a young woman of having a baby outside marriage that was prevalent at
the time. A further 33 women were sentenced to death and reprieved for
murdering their children. In at least two cases, these murders could be
described as mercy killings. Many of the remaining cases concerned the murders
of husbands and boyfriends. One woman had her conviction for murdering her
infant child quashed on appeal and one woman who murdered her boyfriend, his
father and one of his employees, was found insane after sentencing and
committed to Broadmoor (the secure hospital for the criminally insane).
Sentenced to death, reprieved and yet killed again.
Yes, it did happen! There was at least one case where a man was reprieved
to commit murder again after his release on parole. Christopher Simcox was
convicted of his first murder on the 7th of July 1948 but was reprieved due to
the temporary suspension of the death penalty while the Royal Commission were
examining it. He was convicted of a second murder and again received the death
sentence in February 1964. Again he was reprieved. Another case is that of
Donald Forbes who was sentenced to death in 1958 for the murder of Allan
Fisher, an Edinburgh night watchman, during a robbery at a fish factory. He was reprieved, but stabbed a man to death
in a pub brawl in 1970, just weeks after release on licence. He was again
jailed for life, but managed to escape.
Perhaps the most extraordinary case is that of John Thomas Straffen, however.
Twenty two year old Straffen had had a troubled childhood and was in a mental
institution from 1947 to February 1951 after assaulting a child. In August
1951, he strangled two little girls but was found insane and sent to Broadmoor.
In April 1952, he escaped and strangled Linda Bowyer before being recaptured
the following day. He was sentenced to hang for this murder and reprieved after
his appeal. Fortunately, he was not been released and was Britain's longest
serving prisoner. Straffen died in 2007 after 55 years behind bars.
According to Home Office figures, at least 71 people have committed a second
murder after being released on licence from their first life sentence in the
last 35 years.
The Homicide Act of 1957.
This Act became law in March of 1957 applied in England, Wales and
Scotland and in British Military Law. It
did not apply in Northern Ireland, the Chanel Islands or the Isle of Man. It re-classified some forms of murder as
non-capital which did reduce both the number of death sentences and reprieves.
It introduced the notion of diminished responsibility into English law. The
changes in the categorisation of homicides came about as a result of the report
of the 1949-1953 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. From March 1948 to
October 1948, 26 people were reprieved while this Royal Commission was being
set up. Between August 1955 and July 1957, everyone sentenced to death was
reprieved, amounting to 49 cases, while the government tried to frame the 1957
Homicide Act. This Act was considered an unworkable shambles by almost
everyone, however, including the then prime minister.
Under the Homicide Act of 1957 the five categories of murder for which
the death sentence was still to be mandatory were :
64 men and one woman were sentenced to death after March 1957 and of
these, 29 men were hanged - a reprieve rate of 44.6%. Surely the whole point of
the Act was to eliminate unfair and unnecessary death sentences and yet
reprieves continued at only a slightly reduced rate after it. If 36 of these
people didn't deserve to die, why were they sentenced to death in the first
place? Age was not typically a bar to execution of males in most cases, 18 of
those hanged were under 25, two being still teenagers. On the 9th of November
1965, the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act suspended the death penalty
for murder in the United Kingdom for a period of 5 years, leading to the
reprieve of the last 19 men sentenced to death in 1965.
The first man to be sentenced under the 1957 Act was Ronald Patrick Dunbar for
a murder committed during the course of a robbery in 1957, and the last was
David Stephen Chapman on the 1st of November 1965 for a similar offence, both
were reprieved.
Only one woman was sentenced to death after the passing of this act. Mary
Wilson was dubbed by the press as the "Widow of Windy Nook." She was reprieved in 1958, probably because
of her age, she was 66 years old, even though she had poisoned two husbands.
Under the provisions of the Act, she should have been executed, as the two
murders were committed on different occasions. Twenty one year old Maureen
Hanrahan, who with 23 year old Patrick Doran, was convicted of a robbery/murder
in early March of 1957 before the Act took effect. They were both reprieved
however. Similarly three men, Kenneth Smith, Vincent McTair and Peter Hurst,
although convicted after March 21st, were indicted for murder under the old law
and were thus reprieved.
Click here
for a graph showing the post 1957 situation.
A short quiz.
See how good you are at guessing the Home Office's decisions in four
actual cases, all from the Spring of 1955, under the stewardship of the same
Home Secretary. There was no question of guilt in any of them, by the way.
A 40 year old woman was convicted of murdering her next door neighbour,
an 86 year old woman, by battering her to death with a shovel after a long
running feud between the two women. The case attracted virtually no publicity
and it was really only her husband who made any effort, on her behalf, to save
her.
A 33 year old army sergeant was convicted of murdering a colleague,
whose wife he was having an affair with at a British Army base in Germany. He
had killed his victim with a karate chop to the throat and tried to make the
murder look like a suicide by hanging. Afterwards, he married his victim's
wife.
A 28 year old man was convicted of the murder of his girlfriend, whom he
had stabbed to death in a fit of jealousy. He then cut his own throat and stabbed
himself but recovered from his injuries.
A 28 year old woman shot her abusive boyfriend to death, also in a fit
of jealousy, after he had refused to see her over the Easter holiday. She had earlier
suffered a miscarriage having been punched in the stomach by him.
So what do you think happened to each of them? Were they reprieved or
hanged? Answers at the bottom of the page.
Conclusions.
Should people have only been sentenced to death where the murder(s) that
they had committed called for the ultimate punishment and that there was every
intention to follow through with execution?
Sadly, English law did not allow this. Unlike America, we had no degrees of
murder. Up to 1957, the jury were allowed three possible verdicts: guilty of
murder, guilty of manslaughter (against tightly defined rules) or not guilty
(which also included insanity). In many instances, only the first verdict was
possible. It is impossible to say in how many cases the jury may have found the
defendant guilty of murder, but in the second degree, had they had the
opportunity. I suspect it would have happened quite frequently, as they often
made a recommendation to mercy with their guilty verdict.
A reprieve rate of perhaps 3-5% may be acceptable because there will
always be special cases and exceptional circumstances in any judicial system.
If it is consistently higher than that, then surely the law needs to be changed
to suit current thinking rather than just carrying on imposing the death sentence,
regardless of public opinion and evolving standards. I am not arguing here that
95-97% of the 1,485 death sentences should have been carried out but rather
that 45% of them should never have been passed in the first place.
It is important that the public clearly understands the penalty for specific
crimes if they are expected to be deterred by this penalty. In reality, they
were faced with a confusing and contradictory system which was often seen as
unjust and unfair. Endless reprieves undermined respect for the legal system
and the administration of justice. Is it any wonder that the general public in
the 1950's and early 60's had no confidence in the administration of capital
punishment and, by extension, the judicial system? The abolition movement found
that they were increasingly "pushing at an open door" in respect of
public opinion.
In conclusion, it could be said that a system of reprieves is no
substitute for a fair and just application of the death sentence.
For further background reading, please click here to read my
article on the Abolition of Capital Punishment in
Answers to the quiz.
Their names, in order, were Mrs Sarah Lloyd, (reprieved and served just
seven years in prison). Sgt. Emmett Dunne (reprieved, as Germany did not permit
capital punishment, even for soldiers from a foreign country. Bear in mind that
the crime was committed on a Sovereign military base and therefore, at least in
theory, a part of Britain. He served 11 years in prison.)
Alfred John Wayman (reprieved on the grounds that the throat wound might open
up if he was hanged and lead to an unpleasant mess, so instead he served 12
years of his life sentence.) and finally Ruth Ellis who was hanged. Click here for
full details of her case.
If you can square the actual punishments to their crimes and see any
proportionality in them, you are doing better than me!
Back to Contents page. Timeline of hanging in Britain. History of British judicial hanging.
The abolition of capital punishment.
