Capital Punishment.

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at on 30 October 1929.

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Photo of Professor Sir Charles Oman Professor Sir Charles Oman , Oxford University

I can put my case in a very few words. I shall not plunge into statistics, because statistics are the most deceptive things in the world. The hon. Gentleman opposite gave us the statistics of the United States. I will reply to him by quoting what President Hoover said soon after his inauguration about the murder carnival of the United States. He said that the one disgrace which his whole tenure of power would be devoted to putting down was the way in which murderers were neither arrested nor tried nor executed in the United States. In places like Chicago, and to a less extent like New York, murder went undetected and unpunished. Statistics in that state of affairs do not seem to be extremely valuable. Do you suppose that the amount of murder in Chicago is lessened or increased by the fact that the death punishment is supposed to prevail there? It is the social conditions in Chicago which cause the murders.

The second point I will make is in regard to the equally hopeless and unreal point that it is the shadow of the gallows which causes the newspapers to publish and the public to read the horrible details of murder cases. That is not true in the slightest. The public and the newspapers revel quite as much in a big financial swindle or a high-class divorce case. Mr. Bottomley got ten times as much space in the newspapers during his trial as did Mr. Smith, the wife murderer, who had drowned three wives in a bath. What the newspapers report is not influenced by the gallows at the end. If a criminal cuts up his victim into 50 pieces, that is what the news-papers and their readers revel in, not the fact that this person is going to the gallows in the end. It is the horrible details of the case which interest the un-healthy public. Our newspapers have had an extreme responsibility during the last 10 or 20 years in stressing the details of horror, whether in a big swindle, or in a divorce case, or a murder, but I do not agree at all that the gallows at the end has anything to do with the demoralisation of the public. The unholy desire of sensation acts equally well in divorce cases or in a colossal financial swindle.

This is not a Motion asking that more care shall be used in the condemnation of all sorts of murderers. There are murderers and murderers. We know perfectly well that Maidstone Gaol is full of unfortunate men who, tempted by a nagging wife, have given a blow too much, and this Motion does not deal with people who commit murders in the heat of provocation. It seeks to release from the gallows the deliberate murderer, who, for most sordid ends, has gone on for a series of years doing murder for gain. May I point out the sort of people which this Motion covers? There is, for example, the Reading baby farmer, a woman who in five years starved seven-teen children to death. It was habitually carried on for a long time and was done for pure gain. The parents of illegitimate children brought their children to her, and said, "We do not want to see them again," and she starved them all Is that the sort of thing you do not feel a hatred for, and is that the sort of thing that should be punished by the woman being merely shut up for life? What good would that woman be to society or herself shut up for thirty or forty years for this kind of crime? I should prefer that she should be left to a greater justice than ours. Take the case of the murderer Palmer of Rugeley who insured his relatives and those with whom he had made gambling bets and poisoned them regularly. He was a habitual poisoner. Is it to be said that for a crime like that he is to be punished merely by being shut up? That would cost the State time and money for no profit whatever. The French are much more ticklish about the death penalty than we are. They quite regularly acquit persons who have committed murders under the influence of sexual excitement, but they regularly guillotine the worst class of the criminals. There was a case far worse than the English one of the man who killed three brides in the bath, the case of Landru, where the number of victims ran into double figures, and where the murders were continued over a series of years—was it three or five years? The French regard a crime of that kind as suitable for the guillotine. Only last week there was a case in the newspapers in which a French court ordered the execution of two farm servants who had murdered a farmer, his wife, his children and two maidservants in order that they might share a large sum of money which the farmer had just received. We say, by this Motion, that those are the kind of people who ought not to suffer capital punishment. I hold that there are extreme cases of turpitude, of deliberate, wholesale murder for the mere purpose of gain, which we dare not take out of the list of offences which should be visited by capital punishment. There are certain classes of criminals who at present do not use their pistols, but if they knew they were perfectly safe from the gallows they might act like the American gunmen and use them. I do not think the police of England will be particularly pleased with this idea that every burglar may use his gun, with no fear of a death penalty before him. Already, I have exceeded the time that I had intended to speak, and all I wish to say is that there are some crimes so bad, so sordid, and so long continued that healthy opinion cannot tolerate the further existence of those who are responsible for them.