Why was the Death penalty abolished in the 1960s?

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Why was the Death penalty abolished in the 1960s?

The death penalty, or capital punishment as it is also known, refers to the practice of executing someone in punishment of a specific crime. Movements against the death penalty can be seen throughout history, but it was in 1969 when the Death Penalty was abolished in Britain and there were many factors influencing this decision.

One of the leading factors to why the death penalty was abolished in 1960s was due to the influence of the Labour party which was elected in the 1964 General Election. The labour party reflected the more liberal views of society and when the death penalty was finally abolished for ordinary crimes, it was under the Labour party in 1965. However, to fully understand why the death penalty was abolished in the 1960s, we must first understand when the changing attitudes towards the death penalty began.

Tomlinson claims that Labour began ‘emerging in 1906’ and was against the death penalty from the beginning. For example, in 1929, a Labour member proposed the idea that capital punishment should be put on hold for an experimental five years; however as Mortensen says in her analysis, the conservatives ‘resigned and refused’ to co-operate with Labour plans to abolish the death penalty, as they supported capital punishment. Moreover, the House of Lords were also against the abolition of the death penalty and overturned the Bills for the abolition of the death penalty in both 1948 and 1956.

The outbreak of World War 2 also meant that politicians had did not have time to abolish the death penalty. Nonetheless, the debate for the abolition of the death penalty continued after the war which can be seen as another factor influencing the abolition in 1969. Clark argues that ‘attitudes in Britain had been changed by World War II’, as people were horrified at the number of Jewish murders. Human rights became the focus of people around the world. Clark says that the ‘European Convention on Human Rights was adopted by Britain in 1950’ and this displays the changes in attitudes the political elite held towards the value of human life. These attitudes affected how MPs viewed the death penalty and by the 1960s most Conservatives and Britain’s elite supported the abolitionist view.
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The increasing number of Mps adopting the abolitionist view meant that when Silverman, an influential individual in abolishing the death penalty, presented the Bill for the abolishment of the death penalty for five years, with the amendment ‘that abolition would expire in five years unless it was directly implemented again by both houses to keep it permanent’, in the House of Commons on December 1964 for the third time it was passed by an outstanding vote of ‘200 votes to 98’, as shown by Uschanov. Additionally, the House of Lords approved this Bill with a vote of ‘204 ...

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