DEATH PENALTY

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 154, 26 March 1938, Page 4

DEATH PENALTY

Abolished In Nearly Thirty Countries “There has never been a year in our modern history when we have not hanged someone,” said Mr. John Patou, secretary of the National Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, speaking at Friends’ House recently on the death penalty in England and abroad. Nearly thirty countries, he said, including the Scandinavian countries, had abolished capital punishment. It survived in England as a relic of the code of repressive punishment which existed 150 years ago. It was preserved ■on the grounds that it was essential for social security and that it was better to sacrifice a few murderers than to have more innocent victims murdered. Considering the whole question in relation to the wider aspects of penal reform and the general movement against violence in all directions, Mr. Paton said that one test of the culture of any society was the way it. behaved toward its worst citizens, the people who annoyed, exasperated, or injured it. It was significant that those countries which had reinstituted capital punishment after its abolition were Fascist or semi-Fascist. The death penalty was the chief repression in an organised system of repression. In Italy (where this penalty for homicide had been abolished for a generation), in Austria, and in Brazil reversion to capital punishment had . immediately followed the change from a democratic to a dictatorial Government. It had never been abolished in Germany, though the Weimar > Government haS drafted a new code abolishing it.

The result of inquiries made several years ago by a House of Commons select committee showed that in no single country which had abolished capital punishment had there_ been a tendency after that abolition for murders to increase. In reply to questions Mr. Paton said his society considered that the immediate practical tiling to do would be instead of hanging some murderers and reprieving others to send them all to penal servitude, He thought the number of murders in England was declining. There were about 120 a year, and the number of murderers executed was round about 10 per cent. There was evidence that in recent years juries had increasingly tended to find ways of avoiding verdicts that would lead to the death penalty. He commented on the number of verdicts of guilty but insane, when there was no evidence that the number of mental, eases in this country had increased.