Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain

Audience, Justice, Memory

Lizzie Seal

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415622448
• eBook ISBN: 9781136250712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in 1965. At this time, the way people in Britain perceived and understood the death penalty had changed – it was an issue that had become increasingly controversial, high-profile and fraught with emotion. In order to understand why this was, it is necessary to examine how ordinary people learned about and experienced capital punishment.

Drawing on primary research, this book explores the cultural life of the death penalty in Britain in the twentieth century, including an exploration of the role of the popular press and a discussion of portrayals of the death penalty in plays, novels and films. Popular protest against capital punishment and public responses to and understandings of capital cases are also discussed, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of justice. Miscarriages of justice were significant to capital punishment's increasingly fraught nature in the mid twentieth-century and the book analyses the unsettling power of two such high profile miscarriages of justice. The final chapters consider the continuing relevance of capital punishment in Britain after abolition, including its symbolism and how people negotiate memories of the death penalty.

Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain is groundbreaking in its attention to the death penalty and the effect it had on everyday life and it is the only text on this era to place public and popular discourses about, and reactions to, capital punishment at the centre of the analysis. Interdisciplinary in focus and methodology, it will appeal to historians, criminologists, sociologists and socio-legal scholars.

1 Capital punishment in Britain since 1868

Concepts and context

First, this chapter outlines the conceptual approach that will be taken to understand capital punishment in twentieth-century Britain. This draws from the ‘cultural turn’ in the sociology of punishment and analyses of the ‘cultural life’ of the death penalty, which highlight its symbolic resonance. The significance is explored of capital punishment as an ambivalent practice that generates anxiety and conflicted feelings. The chapter then undertakes a discussion of the changing policies and practices of capital punishment in Britain since 1868, as well as considering some of its wider cultural representations. It argues that continuing attempts to civilise and modernise execution, and to resolve its contradictions, showed its ongoing, deepening ambivalence. As a bodily punishment starkly enacting the state’s violence, hanging became increasingly out of place in twentieth-century Britain, with its developing Welfare State and expanded notions of citizenship. However, the death penalty also retained its profound retributive appeal. The social categories of gender and age are particularly significant to understanding restrictions placed on the death penalty in the earlier part of the twentieth century, and also highlight important ambivalences that deepened in the 1950s. These uncertainties related back to understandings of civilisation and modernity.

The cultural life of capital punishment

The cultural turn in the sociology of punishment has encouraged scholars to explore how punishment ‘is practiced and played with in daily life’.¹ Penal cultures are not only generated by ruling elites and the personnel of the criminal justice system, but also in everyday talk and representations. Punishment lives in ‘the quotidian as well as the majestic’.² This needs to be understood if we are to appreciate not just how the wider culture shapes penal practice, but also how forms of punishment have a role in shaping the wider culture.³ In order to gain a fuller picture of the place of capital punishment in twentieth-century Britain, it is necessary to analyse how it figured in people’s day-to-day lives.⁴ We can interpret this both in relation to how people reacted to the death penalty while it was in use and in terms of how it lives on in cultural memory. Perceptions of capital punishment created and create ‘folk knowledge’ – ‘everyday, taken-for-granted understandings’⁵ about this practice – which is as much a part of its historical and cultural legacy as its construction in political and legal processes.

This attention to the everyday is not intended to replace political and legal understandings, which are also part of the culture of capital punishment (and are primarily responsible for the specific form in which it is practised and, of course, whether it is practised).⁶ However, the story of the death penalty in everyday life in twentieth-century Britain remains largely untold by historians and sociologists, meaning that this crucial aspect of the culture of capital punishment needs sustained examination.

The death penalty is particularly well suited to a cultures of punishment approach. It necessarily exists as the most severe punishment in societies that employ it and is the state’s ultimate sanction. More than any other punishment, execution demonstrates the state’s authority and monopoly on violence, which extends to power over life and death of its own citizens.⁷ It carries echoes of the absolute power historically exercised by monarchs and as such symbolises and defines the sovereignty of the state.⁸ Capital punishment is highly expressive as it communicates moralities and demarcates behaviour that is to be totally reviled. This can be understood as its pedagogical function.⁹ For example, Jarvis describes the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Communist spies in Cold War America in 1954 as a ‘political education’ for the wider American populace.¹⁰

Capital punishment is also highly ritualistic and performatively constitutes aspects of the character of the society in which it is exercised.¹¹ The proclamation of the death sentence has an ‘incantatory power’ that illustrates the ceremonial function of the death penalty.¹² Changes in the method of execution indicate shifts in how the governing elite of a society sees itself and wishes to be seen.¹³ In the United States, the replacement of hanging with the electric chair, and the electric chair with lethal injection, demonstrated an ongoing project to perform a civilised, modern type of execution that was efficient and free of pain and gore.¹⁴ The communicative, ritualistic nature of the death penalty gives it the potential to be laden with overflowing meaning.¹⁵ Some of these meanings are communicated by the state as part of its stage management of the execution scene but such an elemental event expresses and can be assigned with a multiplicity of meanings that can subvert and resist the dominant message.¹⁶ Smith examines how the condemned can subvert and re-appropriate the execution scene. Through a performance of penitence and piety, Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, rewrote her state mandated role of murderess and bad woman.¹⁷

The symbolic potency of the death penalty means that it generates discourses and narratives that communicate meanings beyond the punishment of wrongdoing, and the life and death of the condemned, to wider social and cultural issues.¹⁸ These can relate to perceptions of respectability, the construction of social identities and inequalities in terms of class, race and gender,¹⁹ understandings of national identity and the contemporary state of society.²⁰ As such, the discourses and narratives surrounding capital punishment reflect and reproduce hopes and anxieties about the past, present and future.²¹ The significance of gender in particular to cultural analysis of the death penalty has frequently been ignored or underplayed.²² In relation to twentieth-century Britain, gender – especially constructions of femininity – cannot be sawn off from a cultural analysis of capital punishment because gendered understandings were absolutely integral to it.

The significance of emotions has been recognised as increasingly important in analyses of crime and punishment.²³ As a matter of life and death, the death penalty has the potential to generate particularly strong emotional reactions and it has been argued that people’s views on capital punishment are primarily shaped by how they feel about it.²⁴ The heavily symbolic nature of capital punishment is tied to its strong emotional resonance. Belief in the need for the death penalty as a deterrent can be allied to fear of crime and wider feelings of insecurity.²⁵ Arguments that execution is uncivilised are associated with feelings of disgust at bodily punishment.²⁶ Disgust can also be significant to gaining capital convictions for especially ‘heinous’ murders.²⁷ Reactions to particular cases often involve personal identification and empathy, either on behalf of the condemned or with the relatives of the victim.²⁸

Capital punishment and ambivalence

Franklin Zimring has highlighted the significance of ambivalence to American policies and practices of capital punishment. He identifies conflicted feelings about the death penalty at the legal, political and public levels within states.²⁹ Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v Georgia in 1976,³⁰ which ended the national moratorium on execution in the United States established by Furman v Georgia in 1972,³¹ many states passed death penalty statutes in the 1980s. However, not all of these actually executed death sentenced prisoners, creating the new phenomenon in certain states, such as California, of large death row populations but few or no actual executions.

Zimring argues that this ‘reflected conflict and uncertainty about capital punishment in the states themselves’.³² He examines New York as a prime example of this ‘internal ambivalence’ towards the death penalty, where the re-election of anti-capital punishment governors meant the vetoing of death penalty legislation. When the capital punishment statute finally passed in 1995, it was for a death penalty with a very narrow application, meaning that actual executions were unlikely.³³ This reflected the climate of moral uncertainty regarding capital punishment in New York. The campaign for the successful statute focused on passing the legislation, rather than the execution of prisoners, creating a measure that reflected the ambivalent feelings amongst politicians and the public within the state. Similarly, the capital punishment legislation that was passed in Kansas in 1994 was narrow in scope, signalling the state’s ‘normative ambivalence’ about the death penalty.³⁴ Galliher and Galliher describe this legislation as symbolic because it could only be applied to a small number of cases. It can be understood as an attempt to fill ‘an ever-shifting, ambivalent “cultural space” for Kansans’,³⁵ as a seldom used death penalty is able to fulfil competing demands.

Since the nineteenth century, American capital punishment can be best comprehended as an ambivalent, uneasy practice ‘with a shaky consensus often contingent on a complex variety of racial, cultural, and criminological considerations’.³⁶ Although American public opinion is frequently described as supportive of the death penalty, it is ‘both complicated and ambivalent’, shifting according to the specific wording of survey questions,³⁷ and in relation to certain triggering events.³⁸ It is often noted in death penalty s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editors Introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Capital punishment in Britain since 1868: concepts and context
• 2 Audience, publicity and emotion
• 3 Trial and execution as entertainment
• 4 Popular protest against execution
• 5 Public responses to capital punishment
• 6 Haunted by the ghosts: Edith Thompson and Timothy Evans
• 7 Penal currents in the post-abolition era
• 8 Negotiating memories of capital punishment
• Index