PENALTY

The United Kingdom
Many lessons can be learned from the United Kingdom, where the death
penalty was in effect abolished in 1965. 36 Between 1966 and 1993, there
were 13 attempts in Parliament to reintroduce the death penalty for certain
categories of murder. These attempts ended after a shocking series
of miscarriages of justice in cases concerning particularly heinous crimes.
The most notable were those of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford
Four, all wrongfully convicted of murder through terrorist bombings,
and Stefan Kisko, a man of limited intelligence, wrongfully convicted of
a child sex murder. “All would certainly have attracted the death penalty
had it been available. This persuaded many who had previously supported
the reintroduction of capital punishment to change their minds.” 37
The last execution in the United Kingdom was carried out in 1964,
but it was not until 1999 that the United Kingdom ratified Protocol
No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights and Protocol
No. 2 of the ICCPR, thus marking by international treaty its final
rejection of capital punishment.
the Court of Appeal found that the conviction of Mahmoud Hussein
Mattan, who was hanged in Cardiff Prison on 8 September 1952,
should be quashed. In delivering judgement, Lord Justice Rose stated
that the case had wide significance and demonstrated that “capital
punishment was not perhaps an appropriate culmination for a criminal
justice system which was human and therefore fallible.” 39
CONCLUSION
A precondition, under international law, for imposing the ultimate
penalty is that the investigation, prosecution and trial have been
conducted with impeccable fairness and propriety. All too often,
capital trials fall short of these standards. But even when procedural
guarantees are improved and the protection of law is provided to all
individuals, wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice will still
occur. The likelihood of wrongful convictions can be decreased, but
the risk that innocent people will be executed can never be eliminated
altogether as there is no perfect justice system.
There have been no campaigns since then, in the press, by
pressure groups, or in parliament to seek to reinstate the
death penalty. Even the families of the victims of the most
appalling types of crime, like the abduction and sexual
murder of children, have expressed themselves generally as
satisfied by a sentence of life imprisonment, with a guaranteed
lengthy period of custody. 38
This rejection of capital punishment has been further strengthened
by a series of cases where the courts have posthumously reviewed
the murder convictions of individuals who were executed. In 1998,
36 In 1965, the death penalty for murder was suspended for a period of five years (to expire on
31 July 1970) unless both houses of Parliament determined that it should not expire by affirmative
resolutions. In reality this was the end of capital punishment for murder in the United
Kingdom, and in 1969, the House of Commons endorsed the 1965 Act.
37 Roger Hood, “Abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom”, paper presented at
the workshop Global Survey on Death Penalty Reform, Beijing, 25-26 August 2007, p. 13. See
also Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle, The Death Penalty: A World-wide Perspective, 4th ed.
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 42-47.
38 Ibid, p. 14.
39 R v. Mattan, All England Official Transcripts 676 (1998), Court of Appeal, United Kingdom.
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