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Crime and Punishment - The Story of Capital Punishment

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Today, there are over 50 countries around the world which continue to use the death penalty.

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Individuals who break the law can face a firing squad in China...

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..lethal injection in the USA...

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..and the hangman's noose in Singapore.

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It is only a decade since capital punishment was finally removed from British law.

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For centuries, Britain carried out state executions,

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and capital punishment was defended as a deterrent against crime,

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retribution against those who broke society's rules.

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The noose would be put over their neck,

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a hood put over their heads and then the cart would drive away, leaving them to dangle

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and to gradually, slowly, after 30 minutes, to strangle to death.

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For over 200 years, a moral battle raged

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about whether the state has the right to execute.

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A powerful liberal elite emerged, determined to abolish the death penalty.

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The death penalty is inhuman and degrading when you see

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how it is carried out and the procedures that are necessary.

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But the vast majority of public opinion has continued to demand the ultimate punishment.

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There are certain sorts of murder that are so premeditated,

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so violent and so shocking,

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that in the interests of maintaining confidence in the rule of law,

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the only appropriate punishment is the death penalty.

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This debate has shaped our ideas about how a civilised society

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should punish its citizens in the 21st century.

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The word "punishment" comes from the same root as "pain".

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It is, in its essential conception, painful.

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If it is not painful, it is not punishment.

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The history of capital punishment in Britain is a long and bloody one.

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Since the Middle Ages, those condemned to death have variously faced being boiled alive,

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burnt at the stake, or hung, drawn and quartered.

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But it was in the late 18th century that the death penalty was applied most widely.

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London, 1783 - thousands crammed the streets of the capital

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to watch a public execution, carried out in the King's name.

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This is the height of the Bloody Code,

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a system of justice and punishment that listed over 200 offences

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for which a man or a woman could be sent to the gallows.

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In a society in which,

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as they would have expressed it in those days,

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they were lovers of liberty and very keen on property,

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they had to have a means of protecting

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both their liberty and property.

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So you don't want a standing police force or a standing army

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and therefore there was the very successful argument in Parliament

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that you had capital punishment for just about everything.

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Under the Bloody Code, even petty theft,

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like pick-pocketing or stealing a sheep,

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could result in the death penalty.

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And it also threatened to execute anyone who kept the company of gypsies for more than a month...

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or who blackened their face with the intention of stealing.

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Because we have lost sight of its meaning to contemporaries

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and we can reach only for one explanation -

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that those people, 200, 300 years ago,

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were barbarians, compared to us.

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But go back to the 18th century and you have very few prisons,

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very inefficient policing, but you do have the noose.

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And the noose is understood, not as a cruel device,

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but as a way of testifying to the anger of the King.

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The execution day started at Newgate Prison, just west of St Paul's

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in the centre of town

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and the procession went from the gates of Newgate

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through High Holborn, what is now modern Oxford Street,

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on to the site of Tyburn.

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From the Middle Ages, Tyburn had been the traditional site

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of the majority of public executions in Britain.

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The condemned would probably try and wear their best clothes,

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some would put up a big brave show

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and they would be taken along this route,

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where people would either stand on the street,

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or the better off would actually hire out rooms

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on either side of the streets.

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With no police force or prison system, capital punishment served as a deterrent against crime.

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It was therefore important that everyone in society should attend,

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to witness justice being carried out.

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There was one occasion where a schoolteacher was reprimanded by the moral authorities,

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probably by the local newspapers, because he decided to take his children on a picnic

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so they wouldn't see the execution.

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This was considered a very bad thing to do.

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The trouble was, learning a moral lesson from the death of somebody else was what the moralists wanted.

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It wasn't often what they got, because people would frequently

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go along there in more of a party atmosphere.

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The execution day had its own ritual, involving the participation of the crowd itself,

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which appeared to revel in a macabre party atmosphere.

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But some historians have interpreted this scene very differently.

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It misses the silence that descends

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when the executioner comes onto the platform.

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When top hats came into fashion,

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it misses the point of the big cry, "Hats off!"

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It misses the kinds of communication that were possible

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between members of the crowd and the felons about to die.

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The jokes, the teasings, the cries from the crowd, "Hello, Curly!

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"Keep up your spirits!"

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Of course, the poor sod was actually shitting and pissing himself in sheer bloody terror.

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Capital punishment as a deterrent was believed to work due to the painful nature of the executions.

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Hangings often ended in a slow strangulation.

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If they were lucky, their friends would pull on their legs to help end their misery.

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This is the origin of the phrase "pulling your leg".

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The watching crowd knew that a person's social class

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would have determined whether they were executed.

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One of the great defences of the death penalty was the idea that somehow, every aristocrat,

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every member of the gentry was subject to the same laws.

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In fact it's not true. It's self evidently not true.

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99.9% of everybody who was executed by the state

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was dirt poor and from the lowest class of Britain.

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The vanishingly small number of aristocrats and members of the gentry

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who ended their lives in execution,

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did so by dint of being psychopaths and lunatics.

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The accused faced trial by a jury drawn from the local community,

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many of whom were sympathetic to the defendant's case.

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Frequently, these juries sought to commute the punishment to avoid the death penalty.

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Many juries, for example, refused to value property at their full value,

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precisely in order to prevent a capital charge being applied in that particular case.

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Juries also, regularly, um...

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regularly pleaded for mercy, even after they'd found somebody guilty

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and seen them sentenced to be hanged.

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Between 1770 and 1830, over 35,000 people were sentenced to death,

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but only one in ten were actually executed.

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But the elite in society were indifferent to any notions of unequal justice.

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They believed capital punishment worked as a deterrent.

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And even enlightened thinkers of the time, such as the churchman and philosopher, William Paley,

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were able to justify this, even if innocent people were executed.

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When he was told that many people were hanged

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who didn't deserve it or who might even be innocent,

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"Oh!" he said, in a very fine language, of course,

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"So what? These people may be deemed to have hanged for England!"

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In other words, their deaths were part of the price we had to pay

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for social order and deference to the established hierarchy.

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This view was supported by the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant,

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who argued that even in a civilised society,

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the state had the right to punish the individual.

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For Kant, the only purely evil thing is an evil will,

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so you measure the seriousness of the crime

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by the attitude of the criminal.

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For Kant, the death penalty was a moral imperative.

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It was a duty, but it was to be done without any emotion.

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We did it as a matter of duty.

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And, in fact, we celebrate human dignity by executing them,

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by saying, "You are a responsible agent.

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"You chose to do what you did, and you deserve to die for it.

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"We will not look at you as a means to deter others from committing crimes."

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He firmly believed that you never use a person as a means to your ends.

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Human beings are ends in themselves.

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Kant's ideas continued to influence the debate about punishment

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into the 19th century and a new Victorian era.

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But by the 1830s, the election of the Whigs into government brought a new reforming agenda.

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The Reform Act famously gives the vote to the middle classes,

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but also a lot of the statutes on the Bloody Code are repealed,

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so that by the end of the 1830s, you can hang really only for murder.

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Despite this new age of reform, the Victorians were still committed

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to retaining the death penalty for those convicted of murder.

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But for other, lesser crimes, they wanted a more proportional punishment that fitted the crime,

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so a sheep stealer would no longer be treated the same as a murderer.

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Punishment ought to be not only proportional,

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but by being proportional to the offence, rational.

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Measurement, proportionality is one big idea that begins to unseat

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the old system that had, of course, gone back for centuries.

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Dismantling the Bloody Code had an immediate effect on the Victorian justice system.

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Now, juries were more likely to convict in the knowledge that the death penalty no longer applied.

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They eliminated capital punishment from rape in 1842

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and what happened afterwards is that the conviction rate went straight through the roof.

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It went from a modern equivalent of 5% convictions,

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to between 13% and 18% conviction rate,

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simply because they changed the nature of the punishment associated with that particular crime.

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But as conviction rates soared, so too did the Victorians' fear of crime.

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This fear came from the presence of a new mass urban population,

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which, during the Industrial Revolution,

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had migrated to Britain's cities in their thousands.

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As you start to have very large numbers of very poor people,

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crowded into districts together,

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society's becoming much more concerned about criminality,

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about the possibility of a criminal underclass,

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about the consequences of having so many poor people congregated in very small areas.

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One of the other things happening in the early 19th century is

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for the first time the government is collecting figures

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as to how many people are brought before the courts,

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and again, the figures always seem to go up

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and of course, we know now the population is rising anyway.

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The figures are going up so this helps to contribute to this fear of crime

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which is really starting to emerge in the early 19th century.

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In 1862, there is a moral panic about mugging

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that is precipitated in the newspapers by one solitary event,

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when an MP called Pilkington was mugged by a garrotter.

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With conviction rates rising, but fewer crimes subject to the death penalty,

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the Victorians searched for new ideas about punishment.

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Up until now, local jails had just held prisoners before they were punished.

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But into the 1840s, as part of a wider expansion of the state

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and the ending of transportation as a sentencing option,

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the Victorians began to build large prisons across Britain

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as places of both punishment and reform.

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A new idea of prison, where you have the ordered prisons,

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with the sexes separated, different kinds of criminals classified,

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being made to perform useful work as part of their punishment,

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all in a specially designed building, set apart from the rest of the community.

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But those convicted of murder still faced a public execution...

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..which, by the mid Victorian era, was coming under attack from an educated elite.

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You got prominent publicists as well,

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Dickens and Thackeray being probably being the most prominent,

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who both attended public executions and both wrote about them.

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Both of them were appalled by the behaviour of the people.

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"It was so loathsome, pitiful and vile a sight,

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"I did not see one token, in all the immense crowd,

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"at the windows, in the streets,

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"on the housetops, anywhere,

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"of any one emotion suitable to the occasion.

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"No sorrow, no terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness -

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"nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice."

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The public execution is almost a way of saying aggression and violence is acceptable and tolerable

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and is promoted by the state and this is the very last thing the Victorians want.

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They've got a kind of civilising idea.

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It was this disgust at the scene of a public execution

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that led to the first real movement to abolish the death penalty.

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By the 1840s, there's a really very serious movement

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for total abolition of capital punishment in England

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that pulls in people like Thackeray.

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The argument being that we have other ways of controlling order,

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so that we do not need to resort to the sledgehammer control delivered by the noose.

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But the vast majority of the population were convinced

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that the death penalty should be retained,

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and this view was openly supported by the Church of England.

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Now capital punishment is a peculiar punishment, because it was justified specifically on biblical terms.

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All the arguments were to do with the Bible.

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After all, fines, or community service,

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or even being put in the stocks don't actually appear in the Bible.

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They have killed the image of God, another human being,

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and so they will be killed themselves

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and that was accepted by practically everyone.

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Convinced that the death penalty was sanctioned by God,

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the Victorians turned to the newly built prisons to solve the debate over public executions.

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It was one of the suggestions of Bishop Wilberforce

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that we've got these wonderful prisons,

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why don't we put capital punishment into a prison?

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In 1868, the last public execution was carried out on British soil.

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Michael Barrett, an Irish Republican,

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was hanged outside Newgate Prison

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while the crowds sang a popular music hall tune, Champagne Charlie.

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By moving the gallows into the prison,

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the authorities also wanted to introduce a more official and systematic way of killing

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which would be carried out by professional hangmen.

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But you had the rise of regular hangmen,

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one of the things they could do -

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and this was developed in a very systematic way -

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was they could take the weights and measurements of the person they were going to kill.

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They would view them in a prison cell through a loophole

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so they could gauge, this person's stocky, this person's thin, this person's 5 foot 3 or whatever.

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There were scales and measurements by which you could then judge

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how much rope you would use and the quality of the rope.

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That would ensure that you neither made it too long,

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in which case you might decapitate the person,

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or too short, in which case you might strangle the person.

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Just the right length should lead to instantaneous death.

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Hangmen were now expected to carry out their duties in an orderly and responsible fashion.

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One of the concerns that the Home Office had

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was the amount of drinking that the executioners used to engage in

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and so that was restricted.

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From then on, they had to spend the night in the prison before the hanging

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and they were only allowed a quarter of a pint of spirits

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and a couple of pints of ale the night before.

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So it was all much more dignified.

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This move towards a dignified system of capital punishment

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silenced those voices who had called for the abolition of the public execution.

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And once it is proposed to hide the executions in the prison,

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the argument is won for sustaining capital punishment

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all the way through to the '60s. So it is a key moment.

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Had there not been a solution to the problem of the crowd found in the hiding of executions,

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the whole thing might have collapsed much earlier than it did.

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The Victorian era saw a major shift in how a modern civilised society

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maintains order and administers punishment.

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The great transformation of punishment in the modern era

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moved its locus from the body to the personality.

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That is, originally punishment was the infliction of pain and suffering on the body,

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and then the Enlightenment came along

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and the Enlightenment embraced the idea of human beings as rational.

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And instead of inflicting pain and suffering on the body,

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we took the great good not to be so much life, as liberty,

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so that we now correlate the heinousness of the crime

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with a degree of loss of liberty

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and instead of inflicting pain and suffering directly on the body,

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what we do is deprive people of rights.

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For the next 60 years, it appeared that those who supported capital punishment had won the debate.

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# Hangman, hangman Hold it a little while

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# I think I seen my friends coming

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# Riding many a mile... #

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Into the first half of the 20th century,

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executions continued inside the walls of Britain's prisons,

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without any significant opposition.

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# What did you bring me my dear friends

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# To keep me from the gallows pole? #

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While public opinion remained solidly in favour,

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only a handful of eccentrics, like the heiress Violet Van Der Elst,

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campaigned against the death penalty.

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Well, Mrs Van Der Elst was one of those curious figures

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in capital punishment, because she was a classic eccentric Englishwoman.

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She inherited a lot of money and she decided

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not to take up the cause of cats and dogs,

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but to take up the cause of capital punishment.

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And because of her money and her sense of stage management,

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she could ensure big displays wherever she went.

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So, for instance, when executions were taking place in prisons,

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she would drive up to the prison in a Rolls-Royce.

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So she was much more difficult for the authorities to handle,

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because you couldn't just sort of knock her out of the way -

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A) she was a woman, B) she's rich

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C) she's sort of rich and well connected

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and she's in a Rolls-Royce!

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In some ways, of course, she was a person that proponents of capital punishment could point to and say,

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"Well, it's lunatics who are really concerned about this sort of thing."

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Kept from view by the authorities, capital punishment was now largely beneath the public's radar.

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But this would change in the aftermath of the Second World War.

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By executing Nazi war criminals, Britain and its wartime allies

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were exacting a visual show of justice.

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Over 200 of these executions were carried out by a British hangman,

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Albert Pierrepoint,

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whose deployment to Germany propelled him into the spotlight.

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Of course, in the early part of the 20th century,

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the hangman, the executioner, had been an obscure figure.

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He was an agent of the state. His identity was covered up.

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What made Albert Pierrepoint a celebrity

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was not executing people in the 1930s,

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it's when he goes off to Nuremburg at the end of the Second World War

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and he executes all these Nazi war criminals.

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And the press sort of dig and find out his identity

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and he becomes a celebrity, because he's, oddly,

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a kind of patriotic icon, one of our boys,

0:25:550:25:58

who's had the last word in the war by stringing up all these awful Nazis.

0:25:580:26:03

That's the way it's presented.

0:26:030:26:04

And Pierrepoint then becomes the first and only modern executioner celebrity.

0:26:040:26:10

Pierrepoint became a familiar face to British audiences through numerous television interviews.

0:26:110:26:18

You always get a new rope and an old rope.

0:26:190:26:22

Well, we always choose the old rope if we can,

0:26:220:26:24

because a new rope, it seems to lash back. You see what I mean?

0:26:240:26:29

The springing of it, you see?

0:26:290:26:31

If you get an old one that's been used before -

0:26:310:26:33

you've got to examine it well before you use it -

0:26:330:26:35

and you leave it with a sandbag on that, the same weight, hanging overnight,

0:26:350:26:40

you see? It's all prepared for morning then.

0:26:400:26:44

There's a kind of macabre fascination to him, and the reason you have that

0:26:460:26:50

is I think because the concept of executing people

0:26:500:26:53

has become so detached from people's ordinary lives.

0:26:530:26:56

In a very ordered, settled, consensual society,

0:26:560:26:59

to be the person who actually carries out the sentence

0:26:590:27:02

has this kind of weird exoticism to it and I think that's why he became such a public name.

0:27:020:27:09

Did it matter how you attached the rope?

0:27:090:27:11

Oh, yes, there's a certain way in doing it...

0:27:110:27:14

to be instantaneous, yes, very definitely.

0:27:140:27:18

It has on the rope, at the end of a rope, a brass...

0:27:180:27:24

brass ring, like, and the rope goes through that, you see,

0:27:240:27:28

and you put that under the left jaw,

0:27:280:27:30

so when he falls and stops dead, it finishes under the chin...

0:27:300:27:34

should finish under the chin as he throws his head back, and breaks the spinal cord.

0:27:340:27:39

The British public may have supported the Nuremburg executions,

0:27:480:27:53

but by the 1950s, there was increasing disquiet at the continued use of the death penalty.

0:27:530:27:59

In 1953, this unease was evident in the case of Derek Bentley.

0:28:000:28:07

Bentley, along with his accomplice, Christopher Craig,

0:28:110:28:14

were stealing from a warehouse

0:28:140:28:17

when they were confronted by the police.

0:28:170:28:19

Craig fled, but Bentley was arrested

0:28:190:28:22

and was alleged to have shouted, "Let him have it!"

0:28:220:28:26

moments before Craig shot dead PC Sidney Miles.

0:28:260:28:30

As Craig was only 16, Bentley would hang for the murder.

0:28:300:28:34

It also transpired

0:28:370:28:38

that Derek Bentley had a mental age of something like 11,

0:28:380:28:44

that he came from a rather disturbed background.

0:28:440:28:48

These facts were withheld from the jury at the trial.

0:28:480:28:52

He had certainly not been the leader in this enterprise

0:28:520:28:58

of breaking into this warehouse.

0:28:580:29:02

He'd been easily captured by the police

0:29:020:29:05

and the police simply said that he had shouted out to Craig

0:29:050:29:09

as he came up onto the roof, "Let him have it!"

0:29:090:29:13

That was much disputed.

0:29:130:29:15

The case rested on the prosecution's assumption that "Let him have it!"

0:29:160:29:21

was an encouragement to shoot the policeman, not to hand the gun over.

0:29:210:29:25

But many of the public disagreed with this interpretation.

0:29:260:29:30

And there was even doubt that he had said this at all.

0:29:320:29:35

I think everybody thought that he would be reprieved,

0:29:380:29:41

and when he wasn't reprieved, there was a great deal of public concern,

0:29:410:29:45

both in the press, but also by people going along to the prison in the morning

0:29:450:29:49

and creating a large demonstration.

0:29:490:29:52

The apparent injustice led to some public sympathy for Bentley

0:29:540:29:59

and to a questioning of the state's right to execute a mandatory death sentence...

0:29:590:30:04

..on a vulnerable individual.

0:30:050:30:08

I think what that demonstrated

0:30:110:30:13

was that, to have a system in which the death penalty was mandatory for murder

0:30:130:30:20

and in which everything, every way of trying to classify murders

0:30:200:30:26

as those that were death worthy or not death worthy

0:30:260:30:29

came down to a political decision of the Secretary of State.

0:30:290:30:33

That particular Secretary of State decided that he would not act in favour of Derek Bentley,

0:30:330:30:39

so there seemed to be a gross unfairness in the case.

0:30:390:30:42

Bentley's case caught the public's attention through its coverage in the press.

0:30:440:30:49

Through the 1950s, capital punishment

0:30:510:30:53

began to be openly debated on the pages of the nation's newspapers.

0:30:530:30:57

Britain had one of the highest rates of newspaper readership in the world

0:30:590:31:03

and there's enormous competition between The People,

0:31:030:31:07

The News of the World, The Mirror, The Mail, The Express and so on,

0:31:070:31:11

and they used those classic kind of Victorian staples

0:31:110:31:15

of sex and sensation and murder and whatnot, to sell copies.

0:31:150:31:19

In 1955, the press seized on the story of Ruth Ellis,

0:31:220:31:27

a young woman sentenced to hang for the murder of her lover.

0:31:270:31:32

We have to say there's an element of interest in the fact that it was

0:31:350:31:39

an attractive woman, that it was a crime of passion, so called.

0:31:390:31:44

She wasn't necessarily a sympathetic person,

0:31:440:31:47

in those times when promiscuity was decried even more than today.

0:31:470:31:53

She'd had a couple of lovers, she had two children.

0:31:530:31:56

There was quite a bit of concern that she just didn't shoot him once, but several times.

0:31:560:32:01

But there was a degree of public empathy for Ruth Ellis.

0:32:060:32:09

Like the Bentley case two years earlier, people questioned whether

0:32:090:32:14

this "crime of passion" should carry a mandatory death sentence.

0:32:140:32:19

The idea that a distraught woman acting in a passionate moment

0:32:230:32:28

would go to the gallows, I think, caught the public imagination

0:32:280:32:33

and made people question whether that was the right thing to be doing to a young woman.

0:32:330:32:39

BELL TOLLS

0:32:410:32:45

That raised the further question, if it was not right to do it to young women,

0:32:460:32:52

was it right to do it to young men?

0:32:520:32:54

And so I think the debate, if you look at the papers,

0:32:540:32:59

I think she is... and the way her case was treated,

0:32:590:33:03

was the catalyst for what would later become a campaign.

0:33:030:33:08

Both Bentley and Ellis were hanged

0:33:090:33:12

by Britain's chief executioner, Albert Pierrepoint.

0:33:120:33:15

Such was the controversial nature of the Ellis and Bentley cases,

0:33:170:33:22

that in 1957, the Conservative Government passed the Homicide Act

0:33:220:33:27

which introduced the new defences

0:33:270:33:29

of provocation and diminished responsibility for murder.

0:33:290:33:34

So they brought in that some murders would be

0:33:360:33:39

capital murders - what the Americans call first-degree murders,

0:33:390:33:43

capital murders, and other murders -

0:33:430:33:46

the pub fight, the domestic dispute, or whatever, would not be.

0:33:460:33:51

This law resulted in fewer executions,

0:33:530:33:57

with only five or six people a year being sent to the gallows.

0:33:570:34:01

But the Homicide Act caused confusion.

0:34:020:34:05

-NEWSREEL:

-'We don't know why some are hanged and some reprieved.

0:34:070:34:10

'One Sunday newspaper posed this question and gave these examples.

0:34:100:34:13

'Francis Forsyth, 18, murdered Alan Gee as he was walking home.

0:34:130:34:19

'He robbed him and kicked him unconscious with his pointed shoes.

0:34:190:34:22

'Forsyth was executed.

0:34:220:34:23

'But David Deduchar, 21, did much the same thing.

0:34:230:34:28

'He battered an old man to death and stole his wallet.

0:34:280:34:30

'Deduchar was reprieved.'

0:34:300:34:33

Those sort of anomalies convinced quite a lot of people,

0:34:340:34:38

including members of the judiciary,

0:34:380:34:40

which was the other change that really took place in the '50s and early '60s,

0:34:400:34:46

you actually got members of the judiciary thinking that this just wasn't going to work any more.

0:34:460:34:53

The debate over capital punishment peaked in December 1964,

0:34:580:35:03

when a Labour MP, Sidney Silverman, submitted a Private Member's Bill to Parliament.

0:35:030:35:08

Silverman's bill proposed an experiment - the suspension of all executions for five years.

0:35:100:35:16

On 21st December 1964, as Parliament debated this bill,

0:35:160:35:22

the BBC screened a live debate

0:35:220:35:25

between proponents of capital punishment and abolitionists.

0:35:250:35:30

In two-and-a-half hours from now, we shall know whether or not

0:35:310:35:36

hanging for murder is likely to be abolished in Great Britain.

0:35:360:35:39

At this moment, the House of Commons is locked in debate on capital punishment.

0:35:390:35:44

There will be a free vote at 11 o'clock.

0:35:440:35:46

But I believe this particular penalty for particular people,

0:35:460:35:51

namely professional criminals, is the one real deterrent.

0:35:510:35:56

That argument about deterrence is the standard argument

0:35:560:35:59

that has been put for 150 years in respect of every form

0:35:590:36:02

of capital punishment and has always been proved wrong.

0:36:020:36:05

Astonishing, that Henry Rook should bring testimony today

0:36:050:36:07

to say that he's now convinced

0:36:070:36:09

that that particular argument cannot be borne out...

0:36:090:36:14

Later that evening, Sidney Silverman's bill was passed by 200 votes to 98.

0:36:140:36:21

But it didn't reflect public opinion on the issue.

0:36:230:36:25

Despite much sympathy for cases like Bentley and Ellis,

0:36:270:36:31

there was still widespread support for capital punishment.

0:36:310:36:34

In polls in the 1960s, people said

0:36:360:36:38

the one thing about the whole of the 1960s that they disliked most

0:36:380:36:41

was the abolition of the death penalty.

0:36:410:36:43

So what you have effectively is an elite driven,

0:36:430:36:48

kind of liberal establishment project to reform the death penalty.

0:36:480:36:53

That comes from education and from a different moral outlook and whatnot,

0:36:530:36:58

but it also rests on something that we simply don't have today,

0:36:580:37:02

which is a sense that the people in Parliament know better. They know best!

0:37:020:37:07

And they are not dependant on the kind of popular will, if you like,

0:37:070:37:11

on popular opinion for their mandate.

0:37:110:37:14

So, in a funny way, the abolition of the death penalty would be impossible in today's Parliament.

0:37:140:37:19

It was something only possible in the '50s and '60s,

0:37:190:37:22

because they didn't have that kind of populist, political culture that we have today.

0:37:220:37:26

Despite Parliament's ruling, the debate over capital punishment

0:37:290:37:32

continued to rage throughout the 1960s.

0:37:320:37:35

And they were expecting that if you could abolish it at Parliament,

0:37:380:37:42

that you could also bring it back through Parliament.

0:37:420:37:45

So naturally enough, any high-profile case,

0:37:450:37:50

especially one which might, as it were, lead to at least bringing it back partially,

0:37:500:37:56

say for the murder of policemen, or for a particularly violent set of murders.

0:37:560:38:01

These were leapt on by newspapers in order to try and reverse the decision.

0:38:010:38:06

In October 1965, less than a year after abolition,

0:38:080:38:13

the resolve of Parliament would be tested by one of the most notorious murder cases of the 20th century.

0:38:130:38:20

We think of the mid '60s as this great utopian, happy-go-lucky,

0:38:220:38:26

kind of orgiastic age where everyone is having a great time.

0:38:260:38:30

In fact, the mid '60s was a much more anxious, darker time than we remember.

0:38:300:38:35

In what would become known as the Moors Murders,

0:38:360:38:40

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley kidnapped,

0:38:400:38:43

tortured and killed five children,

0:38:430:38:46

burying them in shallow graves on Saddleworth Moor.

0:38:460:38:49

-REPORTER:

-On these bleak and desolate moorlands,

0:38:500:38:53

1,600ft up in the Pennines, senior police officers believe

0:38:530:38:57

they'll find two more bodies, possibly a third.

0:38:570:39:01

It's impossible to overstate how shocking those crimes were,

0:39:030:39:07

particularly when the tapes were played in court,

0:39:070:39:09

then reported in the newspapers.

0:39:090:39:11

At their trial, there was public outrage

0:39:120:39:15

when a tape recording was played to the court

0:39:150:39:17

of Brady and Hindley torturing 10-year-old Leslie Ann Downey.

0:39:170:39:22

And that means that within a year of the suspension of the death penalty,

0:39:250:39:29

you have newspaper columnists and particularly people in the pub,

0:39:290:39:32

people on the street corners, or whatnot,

0:39:320:39:35

calling for the death penalty to be brought back, because if there are kind of two people

0:39:350:39:39

who to people in he 1960s seem ideal candidates for the hangman's noose,

0:39:390:39:44

it's Brady and Hindley.

0:39:440:39:46

The overwhelming majority wanted to see Brady and Hindley hang for their crimes.

0:39:480:39:54

But public pressure could not convince the government.

0:39:580:40:01

Brady and Hindley were both sentenced to life imprisonment.

0:40:010:40:06

A life sentence for murder was now mandatory,

0:40:090:40:11

following the suspension of the death penalty in 1965.

0:40:110:40:16

The mandatory life sentence was brought in

0:40:180:40:20

as a condition of abolishing the death penalty.

0:40:200:40:24

Those who opposed abolition were told by those who advocated it

0:40:240:40:28

and who in the end prevailed

0:40:280:40:30

that they would always be safeguarded, because there would be this mandatory life sentence.

0:40:300:40:34

The mandatory life sentence was aimed at extending

0:40:360:40:39

the amount of time a convicted murderer could be in prison for.

0:40:390:40:43

In the days of capital punishment, those reprieved -

0:40:450:40:50

and that was the majority of murderers who were reprieved -

0:40:500:40:55

served sentences considerably lower than they would serve today,

0:40:550:41:00

despite the media thinking we are soft on crime.

0:41:000:41:04

Craig, who couldn't be sentenced to the hangman because of his age,

0:41:040:41:09

when Bentley was executed, served 11 or 12 years

0:41:090:41:13

for the shooting of a police officer.

0:41:130:41:17

Now, even as a 16-year-old, he would probably serve a minimum of 25.

0:41:170:41:22

So the sentence doubled!

0:41:220:41:24

In fact, under today's tariff system,

0:41:260:41:29

some prisoners serving life sentences are eligible for early parole.

0:41:290:41:34

But this raises its own moral questions about

0:41:340:41:37

how the state punishes individuals, like Harry Roberts,

0:41:370:41:41

who's been locked up for 44 years,

0:41:410:41:44

convicted after the murder of three policemen in 1966.

0:41:440:41:49

I think it's extremely cruel to lock someone up forever, but in a slightly different way

0:41:490:41:54

from executing them, because it's the gift that keeps on giving, if you see what I mean.

0:41:540:41:59

You're in prison maybe for 40 or 50 years.

0:41:590:42:02

Harry Roberts, the man who murdered three policemen in Shepherd's Bush,

0:42:020:42:06

is still in jail after 44 years.

0:42:060:42:08

I happen to believe he should still be there, because he committed three very, very nasty gratuitous murders.

0:42:080:42:13

And if you let someone like Harry Roberts out - and there's been talk about doing so -

0:42:130:42:18

you are effectively saying to others who might want to kill the police,

0:42:180:42:21

"He was away for 44 years, but in the end it's forgive and forget."

0:42:210:42:25

Wouldn't it be the mark of a more humane society to execute him?

0:42:270:42:32

And if that means dealing, through the state,

0:42:330:42:38

in a final way with someone who has committed the most grave crime,

0:42:380:42:43

then I don't see that that's a problem.

0:42:430:42:46

Well, I counter that by simply pointing out

0:42:460:42:50

that as a matter of logic, it's much worse for an individual

0:42:500:42:54

to spend the rest of their life in prison than to be executed immediately.

0:42:540:43:00

I don't take the view that there is, somewhere down there, a hell

0:43:000:43:05

that all bad people are going to be tortured by,

0:43:050:43:08

I think, you know, if they are turned off, that's an end on it.

0:43:080:43:12

And why give them the benefit of being turned off like that,

0:43:120:43:19

when they could be made...punished for the rest of their lives?

0:43:190:43:25

I think it's a far worse punishment, life imprisonment,

0:43:250:43:28

because they suffer. They suffer!

0:43:280:43:31

In 1969, Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour

0:43:340:43:37

of permanently abolishing the death penalty for murder.

0:43:370:43:41

Two years later, capital punishment was also removed for arson in a Royal Naval dockyard.

0:43:430:43:49

Now hanging only remained for treason and piracy.

0:43:520:43:56

Britain's new position was soon followed by other western countries, like France and Spain,

0:44:020:44:07

which, through the 1970s, would also stop using the death penalty.

0:44:070:44:12

Even the USA, which hadn't executed anyone since 1967,

0:44:160:44:21

suspended capital punishment in 1972.

0:44:210:44:24

In America, the instrument for the temporary abolition of the death penalty was not Congress,

0:44:260:44:32

it was the Supreme Court - the one part of the government of America

0:44:320:44:37

which is not susceptible to re-election.

0:44:370:44:40

It was that body that actually declared

0:44:400:44:44

that at least the process of executions in America was unconstitutional.

0:44:440:44:48

The Supreme Court's decision infuriated the majority of Americans.

0:44:510:44:56

Private papers of the Chief Justice who was in the dissent

0:44:570:45:01

indicate he thought that was the end of the death penalty in America

0:45:010:45:04

as did most abolitionists who thought they'd won their permanent victory.

0:45:040:45:08

They couldn't have been more wrong.

0:45:080:45:10

And the states immediately, responding to overwhelmingly public support for the death penalty,

0:45:100:45:14

and outrage at the United States Supreme Court decision, re-enacted death penalty statutes.

0:45:140:45:20

In 1976, the Supreme Court was forced to review its decision

0:45:230:45:28

in response to widespread public pressure.

0:45:280:45:31

Less than two years ago, death cells in prisons throughout America

0:45:310:45:35

were emptied when the Supreme Court ruled against capital punishment.

0:45:350:45:39

The Court decided it was unconstitutional,

0:45:390:45:42

because it was a cruel and unusual form of punishment, in the sense that it was so arbitrary.

0:45:420:45:47

Some people would be sentenced to death and others merely to a term of imprisonment for the same offence.

0:45:470:45:53

Now, the Court is having to think again, and while it's doing so,

0:45:530:45:56

death rows throughout the country are filling up again.

0:45:560:45:59

The Supreme Court voted to reinstate capital punishment.

0:46:020:46:06

And in 1977, Gary Gilmore became the first person to be executed in the US for ten years.

0:46:080:46:16

Gilmore eventually insisted that the State of Utah put him to death.

0:46:170:46:22

So he was the first of many volunteers from death row,

0:46:220:46:26

basically people who could save their own lives

0:46:260:46:30

by continuing to appeal

0:46:300:46:32

and to have their cases reviewed and have their cases delayed, he took the opposite path.

0:46:320:46:38

He volunteered, the State of Utah put him to death and from that day onwards, the execution pattern began

0:46:380:46:44

once again in the USA, very slowly at first.

0:46:440:46:47

In 1977, there was only two, and in the 1980s, there were a handful each year,

0:46:470:46:52

but by the end of the 1990s, there was almost 100 people being put to death each year.

0:46:520:46:58

Gilmore was executed by a firing squad in Utah.

0:47:010:47:05

Since then, other US States have chosen to use the gas chamber

0:47:070:47:10

or lethal injection to carry out death sentences.

0:47:100:47:14

Gilmore's execution hit the headlines in the British Press

0:47:160:47:20

and inspired some British lawyers to offer to cross the Atlantic

0:47:200:47:24

and help defend those facing the death penalty.

0:47:240:47:27

Through the 1980s, British lawyers, like Clive Stafford Smith,

0:47:300:47:35

took up cases that challenged America's right to execute.

0:47:350:47:39

In a fair world, you are going to win, but the world isn't always a fair...

0:47:390:47:42

'I'd become obsessed'

0:47:420:47:44

with the death penalty and this was from quite a young age.

0:47:440:47:49

I was very young when I was writing something about it,

0:47:490:47:52

I was about 16 at school and I thought it was a history paper,

0:47:520:47:56

I thought the death penalty was history.

0:47:560:47:58

When I discovered that the Americans were still killing each other, I was really shocked.

0:47:580:48:03

A death row inmate is scheduled to die in the gas chamber in two weeks...

0:48:030:48:08

In 1987, a BBC documentary followed Clive Stafford Smith,

0:48:080:48:15

who had volunteered to act as the lawyer for a man on death row in Mississippi.

0:48:150:48:21

14 Days In May captured his attempts to stop Edward Earl Johnson being executed.

0:48:210:48:27

The funny thing is, I think about a future.

0:48:270:48:32

Now that might seem crazy - what future could I possibly have

0:48:330:48:37

knowing that I might supposedly be executed in the next two weeks?

0:48:370:48:41

Despite evidence suggesting Johnson was innocent,

0:48:420:48:45

he was executed in a gas chamber on 20th May 1987.

0:48:450:48:51

Ladies and gentlemen,

0:48:510:48:54

at 12.06am, Wednesday, May 20th, Edward Earl Johnson was executed

0:48:540:48:59

in the lethal gas chamber here at the Mississippi State Penitentiary

0:48:590:49:03

in conformance with the sentence

0:49:030:49:07

of the Circuit Court of Lee County.

0:49:070:49:10

Sitting there, watching him be gassed to death in the gas chamber was just horrific.

0:49:100:49:17

In a way, the fact that there were cameras there made it slightly easier,

0:49:170:49:22

because you thought this was a movie or something and someone would call "Cut!" and it would all be over,

0:49:220:49:28

but I think that's what Edward thought and it made it a little easier for him, perhaps.

0:49:280:49:33

When the family asked me why,

0:49:340:49:36

all I could say was, "It's a sick world, it's a sick world!" Thank you.

0:49:360:49:43

14 Days In May was one of a number of British documentaries

0:49:460:49:50

which attacked capital punishment in America.

0:49:500:49:54

These films helped shape the ongoing debate in the UK.

0:49:540:49:58

When you see documentaries of people on death row in America, which are fantastically common,

0:50:000:50:06

you get the feeling that this is contributing to the debate here,

0:50:060:50:11

reflecting liberal opinion here,

0:50:110:50:13

but probably not actually reflecting

0:50:130:50:16

what the majority of the population believe.

0:50:160:50:18

I don't think it's changed their minds in any way.

0:50:180:50:21

In many ways, as so often with these things, it's the liberal elite speaking to the liberal elite.

0:50:210:50:26

While British programme makers used the American experience to highlight the flaws in capital punishment,

0:50:290:50:36

in the UK itself, there was rising public demand that Britain, too, should begin executing again.

0:50:360:50:43

For the first time since abolition, Britain had a Prime Minister,

0:50:430:50:48

Margaret Thatcher, who supported the death penalty,

0:50:480:50:52

and MPs were given a free vote on the subject throughout the 1980s.

0:50:520:50:58

When I first came into Parliament,

0:50:580:50:59

there was still, certainly in the public domain,

0:50:590:51:02

quite an active debate going on about the death penalty,

0:51:020:51:05

because it was the height of the IRA outrages.

0:51:050:51:08

Innocent people were dying in random terror acts and people were saying,

0:51:080:51:13

"Even if you don't bring it back for anything else, at least bring it back for terrorism."

0:51:130:51:18

So there was still quite a lively debate about whether it should be brought back.

0:51:180:51:23

When there was a free vote on the death penalty, I always voted for restoration,

0:51:260:51:30

because I do believe there's a very strong moral case

0:51:300:51:33

for saying that such a deterrent should be available.

0:51:330:51:36

This government will never surrender to the IRA. Never!

0:51:360:51:42

Really all of that was really smashed

0:51:420:51:45

at the end of the '80s and '90s

0:51:450:51:48

when, of course, the government had to confront the fact

0:51:480:51:53

that in the cases of the Irish terrorists,

0:51:530:51:56

particularly the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four,

0:51:560:52:00

that all of these people had been exonerated on the basis that they had not had a fair trial

0:52:000:52:07

and that...the evidence was not sufficient to convict.

0:52:070:52:13

In 1991, the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four were declared innocent

0:52:150:52:20

and released after spending almost two decades in prison.

0:52:200:52:24

I've been in prison 15 years for something I didn't do,

0:52:240:52:29

for something I didn't know anything about.

0:52:290:52:32

Had Britain retained the death penalty then,

0:52:340:52:36

they would have almost certainly faced execution.

0:52:360:52:40

Whether it's Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, Judith Ward, Tottenham Three and so on,

0:52:400:52:47

in many of these cases,

0:52:470:52:49

what transpired was that...

0:52:490:52:53

there was a...a flawed system.

0:52:530:52:57

Now, you can't have a final verdict, like an execution,

0:52:570:53:02

where you haven't got an infallible system, which means that

0:53:020:53:08

there's a serious risk you are going to, as it were, kill innocent people.

0:53:080:53:14

It was cases of miscarriages of justice like these

0:53:170:53:20

that persuaded many in government that Britain could never reinstate capital punishment.

0:53:200:53:25

In 1994, the last free vote took place in Parliament on reintroducing the death penalty.

0:53:280:53:34

It was heavily defeated, with Home Secretary Michael Howard

0:53:340:53:38

now voting in favour of retaining abolition.

0:53:380:53:42

For a long time, I supported capital punishment,

0:53:450:53:48

because I thought it was a deterrent,

0:53:480:53:51

and actually I still think it is a deterrent,

0:53:510:53:56

but I changed my mind, because of the risk of a mistake.

0:53:560:54:01

It was the cases of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four

0:54:020:54:07

that changed my mind on that.

0:54:070:54:10

I accepted that you could never completely eliminate the risk of mistake

0:54:100:54:15

and since then, I've become adverse as well to the whole idea

0:54:150:54:21

of the state deliberately taking someone's life.

0:54:210:54:24

But it wasn't until 1998, when the Labour government passed the Crime and Disorder Act,

0:54:280:54:33

that the death penalty was completely removed from British Law.

0:54:330:54:37

Up until then, executions could still be carried out for treason and piracy.

0:54:380:54:43

Later that year, the Court of Appeal quashed the 1953 conviction of Derek Bentley

0:54:450:54:52

and he was posthumously pardoned.

0:54:520:54:54

By 2010, 139 countries had abolished the death penalty.

0:54:560:55:01

We are seeing a greater polarisation in the world.

0:55:090:55:14

We are seeing a wide gap between the mental make-up

0:55:140:55:21

of those people in the countries that oppose the death penalty

0:55:210:55:27

and the people in the countries that see no problem with it.

0:55:270:55:34

Surprisingly, the country that has the highest cases of capital punishment per capita is Singapore.

0:55:350:55:41

But it is believed the country that executes the most people per year is China.

0:55:420:55:48

The trouble with China is that it's still a state secret

0:55:500:55:53

and the party will not reveal the number of people sentenced to death and executed. So we have no idea,

0:55:530:55:58

really, how many people are put to death there.

0:55:580:56:01

But at the UN Human Rights Council, at the end of 2007,

0:56:010:56:07

the Chinese delegate made a statement

0:56:070:56:13

that China was reducing its use of the death penalty

0:56:130:56:18

and was setting plans to do so, with the ultimate aim of abolishing it.

0:56:180:56:24

Now, this is a statement really from the state, the state authority, that abolition is a goal.

0:56:240:56:30

We haven't heard that from the United States, I'm sorry to say, from a State Department.

0:56:310:56:36

But even in America today, the use of capital punishment is a lot less widespread.

0:56:390:56:44

It's also true that, amongst the 35 states that have the death penalty,

0:56:440:56:47

about a third never use it,

0:56:470:56:49

another third impose death sentences but rarely carry them out,

0:56:490:56:53

and the death sentences that are carried out

0:56:530:56:55

are typically in one region of the nation, that is to say the South.

0:56:550:56:59

These days, more than half of the death sentences that are executed occur in Texas.

0:56:590:57:05

So, is America a death-penalty nation? Well, in parts.

0:57:050:57:09

In 2010, those American states which continue to use the death penalty have been challenged over whether

0:57:110:57:18

executing an individual in a painful manner infringes their human rights.

0:57:180:57:23

This debate could see the end of the death penalty in America.

0:57:260:57:30

But its supporters have gone back to 18th-century ideas of punishment

0:57:300:57:35

to defend the right to execute.

0:57:350:57:37

To say that it has to be painless is to lose sight of what it is,

0:57:380:57:43

which is punishment.

0:57:430:57:45

In its etymology, in its very meaning,

0:57:450:57:49

the word "punishment" comes from the same root as "pain".

0:57:490:57:54

It is, in its essential conception, painful.

0:57:540:57:59

If it is not painful, it is not punishment.

0:57:590:58:03

When killers intentionally, or with depraved indifference,

0:58:030:58:08

inflict intense pain and suffering on their victims,

0:58:080:58:13

in my view, they should die a quick but painful death.

0:58:130:58:17

Not torture, not drawn out,

0:58:170:58:20

but quick and painful.

0:58:200:58:22

The debate about capital punishment has raged for over 200 years.

0:58:240:58:28

Both sides believe they are in the right.

0:58:310:58:35

And if the history of capital punishment has taught us one thing...

0:58:350:58:39

..it's that both sides will continue to fight their corner, passionately.

0:58:410:58:46

To challenge your views and learn more about the justice system,

0:58:570:59:01

go to bbc.co.uk/justice and follow the links to the Open University.

0:59:010:59:07

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