Until 1965, the death penalty was legal in England. The death penalty is also known as capital punishment and is still legal in some countries today. It is a government approved killing for a punishment of someone’s crimes.
Most people back then believed that it should only be acceptable if the person was definitely guilty of committing the crime to protect the citizens in their society.
However, the ethical problem was that some believed that innocent people were put to death and after death investigations proved this as correct.
A case that inspired some of the uproar around the death penalty was the Derek Bentley case 1953.
Derek Bentley was a 19-year-old with severe learning difficulties.
He was hanged in 1953 for the murder of a police officer, this punishment caused an uproar about the death penalty as people believed Bentley should not have given evidence due to his learning difficulties. The jury asking for his mercy and his lawyer’s appeals were turned down and he was put to death.
Two hundred MPs signed a memorandum requesting to cancel the execution and protesters gathered outside of the prison where he was on the day he was hanged in January 1953.
In 1998, Derek Bentley was pardoned.
The 1965 Murder act stopped the death penalty, and a mandatory life imprisonment sentence replaced it.
When asked about his views on the death penalty, history teacher Louis White said:
"The sad case of Derek Bentley, a man subjected to the death penalty by assumption, highlights how the law is too fragile to be in control over life and death. Whilst punishments used today are not perfect, it is fair to say that progress has been made"
Nowadays, if someone has committed a crime such as murder, they could face life imprisonment. Whole life orders are the most severe punishment in the British legal system, these are where people are sentenced to imprisonment for the rest of their life with no chance of release. The severity of the sentence depends on the severity of the crime committed.
