What Led to the Abolishment of the Death Penalty

2481 Words10 Pages
The abolition of capital punishment was one of a wide range of social reforms in the 1960s, although many of the arguments for abolishing capital punishment had happened in previous decades, it is often viewed as the most important social reform of the 1960s. Whether capital punishment should be abolished was a long running issue, and debates had been going on as early as the 1500s, when Thomas More wrote a book named Utopia in which he questioned the benefits of capital punishment, but the debates were reignited again in the 1960s, following many other reforms that took place. Capital punishment was an ongoing issue which had excited liberal opinion since at least the 1930s, when the execution of pregnant women was prohibited and the death penalty was abolished for people under 18 years old. Later on in 1957 the Homicide Act by the Conservative government radically slimmed down the offences which demanded capital punishment, to just five forms of murder. The number of hangings fell from an average of fifteen a year in the first half of the fifties to about four a year. However some odd decisions were still made on executions, such as Hendryk Niemasz who was executed even though he appeared to have killed someone while sleepwalking. The Homicide Act was effectively unworkable because it allowed some murder to be categorized as more serious than others. For example murders with a shotgun lead to the death penalty, while brutal strangulation following a sexual assault led to imprisonment. The liberal climate would not allow this disparity as it would have been viewed as unfair and would have been one of the factors in considering the abolition of the death penalty. Liberalism was not only contained within the U.K. and U.K. liberalism was most likely strongly influenced by the same ideas stemming from the U.S.A at that time. The impact of liberalism from the USA to
Open Document