Death Penalty Abolished: UK Ends Capital Punishment

The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act received Royal Assent on November 8, 1965, permanently ending capital punishment for murder in the United Kingdom. The law followed a five-year moratorium on executions that had begun in 1960, during which a sustained public debate about the morality and effectiveness of hanging had shifted opinion in Parliament if not fully among the public. The last executions in Britain had taken place on August 13, 1964, when Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans were hanged simultaneously in separate prisons for the murder of John Alan West during a robbery. The abolition movement had been building for decades, driven by a series of high-profile cases in which executed prisoners were later found to have been wrongly convicted. Timothy Evans was hanged in 1950 for murders committed by his neighbor John Christie, and his posthumous pardon in 1966 became the most powerful argument against a system that could not undo its worst mistakes. The campaign was led in Parliament by Sydney Silverman, a Labour MP who had introduced abolition bills repeatedly since the 1940s. Harold Wilson's Labour government allowed a free vote on the measure, and it passed the House of Commons by a substantial margin. Public opinion polls at the time showed that a majority of Britons still supported the death penalty, a gap between popular sentiment and parliamentary action that persisted for decades. Capital punishment for treason and piracy was abolished in 1998, and the UK's ratification of Protocol 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights in 2003 prohibited the reintroduction of the death penalty under any circumstances.