CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

§ Mr. Duncan Sandys (Streatham)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to restore capital punishment for the murder of police or prison officers. It is said that Parliament should not allow itself to be influenced by a passing wave of emotion following the murder of three policemen last August. It should not be assumed that those who are asking for this change in the law are inspired by a temporary feeling of anger and indignation and that they are likely very soon to change their minds.

The majority of the British people have all along believed in capital punishment and since it was abolished last year public anxiety has expressed itself in massive petitions all over the country. The effect of the callous murders at Shepherd's Bush has been to focus attention on the increased dangers to which the police are now exposed as a result of the withdrawal of the death penalty.

People are disturbed by the thought that policemen who risk their lives to protect the community are themselves being denied the full protection of the law for which they ask and which, they believe, would increase their safety. This 1410 is not just an emotional reaction. The strength of public feeling on this question is the measure of the nation's sense of responsibility for the safety of its servants.

It is said that there is no conclusive evidence that capital punishment deters. That may be so. Nevertheless, I think it worth mentioning that, during the two years since executions were stopped, as many policemen have been murdered as during the whole of the previous 13 years. [HON. MEMBERS: "How many?"] It is also worth mentioning that the number of indictable offences involving firearms this year is just about double what it was two years ago. I am sure that all hon. Members, whatever their views on capital punishment, will feel that this shows a very disturbing trend.

Some people believe that capital punishment would make no difference. Its deterrent effect is, of course, questionable in the case of a murderer who is confident that he will not be found out. But criminals who shoot policemen when trying to avoid arrest have already been found out and in many cases they know that, if they submit to arrest, they will go to prison for terms which will be just as long as the average duration of a life sentence. They have, therefore, little or nothing to lose by trying to shoot their way out. If, on the other hand, they knew that they were risking the death penalty, I am sure that some of them, at any rate, would think twice before taking out a gun and pulling the trigger.

Similar considerations apply in prisons, where the number of violent criminals is increasing all the time. The Prison Officers' Association has pointed out that since the abolition of the death penalty there has been nothing to deter convicts who are serving long sentences from killing warders when attempting to escape.

The police and the prison staff look to Parliament to do all in its power to protect those who are fighting the war against crime. They firmly believe that capital punishment will reduce the risk they have to run. If there are any doubts about this, they feel that the benefit of the doubt ought to be given to them rather than to the murderer.

It has been pointed out that, in any case, the law will come up for review in 1970. But many people regard this matter as very urgent and I am sure that 1411 hon. Members will not wish to take the line that this question if not discussible for another four years.

The arguments on both sides cannot be adequately presented in the scope of two ten-minute speeches. I therefore hope that the House will allow the Bill to be presented so that this important issue can be further considered.

§ Sir Geoffrey de Freitas (Kettering)

I hope that the House will not give the right hon. Member for Streatham (Mr. Sandys) leave to bring in the Bill. The police, Parliament and the public are deeply shocked by the three brutal murders which the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, and, of course, the other murder of a policeman in the North. As they have followed the abolition of capital punishment last year, some people have sought to connect the two facts. But however great the personal and the public tragedy of these terrible murders, the fact is that, statistically, no inference can legitimately be drawn.

There is a matter which the right hon. Gentleman did not mention, but with which I should like to deal before coming to the three murders to which he referred. This is a matter which, judging by my correspondence, has worried many people. There have been four brutal murders, one of them by a boy of 14 who is now charged with that murder. But since 1831 we have not hanged boys of 14, so that recent changes in the law could not have any effect whatsoever.

That leaves the three murders which the right hon. Gentleman mentioned. They were terrible murders and very significant, it is argued, but certainly not more significant than the figures for the years 1951. I remember them well. I was the junior Minister at the Home Office. In 1951, the number of murders of policemen suddenly went up to three, and that was two or three years after Parliament had refused to abolish the death penalty. I do not see any way in which to draw any positive conclusions from any of those figures and I merely submit that there is just enough statistical evidence to show the danger of drawing positive conclusions from groups of figures.

1412 The Bill would restore the anomalies of the 1957 Act with the distinction between capital murder and non-capital murder. Under the proposed Bill, the deliberate poisoner, or the man who tortured a child to death, or the man who battered to death an old postmistress, would not be hanged, but the petty thief who shot the policeman who happened to come on the scene would be hanged. Is anything more likely to bring the law into disrepute?

Of course, the public is horrified by the murder of these policemen, but is there any evidence that the public is willing to make this distinction between capital and non-capital murder? The House passed the Third Reading of last year's Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill by considerably more than two to one. Many hon. Members voted for it because they knew that the law would be reconsidered in five years. The Act cannot continue beyond July, 1970, unless both Houses of Parliament separately pass Resolutions asking for the Act to continue. This is a sensible safeguard against legislation prompted by emotion or based on insufficient data. Let us accept the Act and try it for five years and not panic after 12 months.

I have mentioned insufficient data. The right hon. Gentleman referred to the figures for the carrying of firearms. We have had those figures for only the last very few years, when they were established in our criminal statistics, but I must not chase that too far, because the essential point is that we are discussing a Bill about homicide, and we have statistics for homicide going back for years and years. We know that homicides have increased since the war, but they have not increased in proportion to the growth of indictable crime generally. There is no evidence yet that they have been in any way affected by changes in the law relating to capital punishment.

But the root of the argument for the Bill is deterrence related to the murder of policemen. The right hon. Gentleman stated as a fact that the abolition of capital punishment increased the dangers to policemen. We have very little to go on in our criminal statistics, but I have the result of a survey made by the University of Pennsylvania showing the figures for 266 American cities over 35 years. It was found that in States where 1413 there was no capital punishment, fatal attacks on policemen were 1.2 per 100,000, while in cities with capital punishment the rate was almost exactly the same, although slightly higher at 1.3.

Professor Sellin, who conducted the survey, does not make any point of the small fraction of a decimal point, but concludes after this wide study it is impossible to conclude that the States which had no death penalty had thereby made the policemen's lot more hazardous". On this side of the Atlantic, in Western Europe only France and Spain find capital punishment necessary. All our other 13 Western European neighbours, from Iceland to Italy and from Portugal to Finland, get along without capital punishment. The Scandinavians, the Dutch and the Belgians, who are not very different in outlook and institutions from us—and the social conditions in Belgium are even worse than ours in the sense of industrialisation and overcrowding