The Noose Wins

In dealing with proposals to abolish or restrict capital punishment, the Labor government has looked like a comedian tangled up in flypaper. The House of Lords and the plain people (69% of them, according to an opinion poll) want hanging kept as the penalty for murder. A majority in the Laborite House of Commons wants it abolished.

The Lords rejected one House of Commons scheme abolishing the noose for five years (TIME, June 14). So, last fortnight, the House of Commons proposed a "compromise" amendment. It divided murder into two categories, the first punishable by hanging, the second by life imprisonment.

But instead of a simple distinction between premeditation and impulse, the amendment set up some more subtle definitions. It was first-degree murder if connected with robbery, burglary, rape, sex offenses, the death of a policeman or prison guard, the use of explosives. Repeated use of a slow poison, such as arsenic, would be a capital offense; but a single, lethal dose of prussic acid would be only second-degree murder.

Winston Churchill, a sturdy monogamist himself, pointed out the loopholes to prospective wife-killers. If you are anxious to avoid hanging, he said, "you can strangle her, hold her head in a gas oven . . . stab her, cut her throat or bash her brains out. If you can arrange a procedure, you can set her on fire, push her off a station platform in front of an oncoming train, push her through the porthole of a ship, or, more easily, you can drown her in the bathtub."

Nevertheless the House of Commons doggedly passed the monstrosity. When it reached the House of Lords, Labor's Lord Chancellor Viscount Jowitt confessed that "this compromise has not the justification of logic behind it." The Lords scornfully rejected the amendment, and the government gave up. The noose's place in British justice will be unchanged.

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