The Shadow of the Gallows: The Death Penalty and the British Labour Government, 1945–51

Abstract

The punishment prescribed by English law for murder in the first half of the twentieth century was death. A judge had to pronounce this sentence upon a person convicted of murder, except in two special classes of cases: persons under eighteen years of age at the time of the offense and pregnant women. He had no discretion to impose any less severe sentence. While retribution survived only in a symbolic form elsewhere in the criminal law, capital punishment, as Oxford criminologist Max Grunhut maintained, was a “powerful relic of retaliation in kind.” The law still reflected the ancient concept that every murderer forfeits his life becauce he has taken another's life: “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.”