Preliminary Programme

This paper examines the factors that shaped the UK government’s use of the royal prerogative of mercy in response to petitions from a number of prisoners condemned to death in British colonial dependencies and the West Indies Associated States in the 1960s and 1970s, including the impact of the abolition of capital punishment for murder in the UK from 1965 and the changing nature of Britain’s constitutional and judicial relationships with its former colonies. Drawing on a range of official and media sources it shows how government ministers in the UK sought to balance diplomatic pressures, human rights commitments, constitutional law and the demands of local independence movements in its response to clemency appeals. The result was a patchwork of often contradictory decisions across different territories that reveals the limits of British opposition to the death penalty and illustrates both the diversity of death penalty decision-making across common law jurisdictions and Britain’s limited capacity to promote a uniform approach to the death penalty in its remaining overseas territories at the end of Empire. From a longer term perspective, the political deliberations that the article uncovers also represent an important early moment in Britain’s efforts to engage with issues of death penalty reform and abolition on the international stage in the second half of the twentieth century. (Show less)

In marked contrast to the other regions of the post-World War II United States, rape remained a capital offence in the southern region (and would remain so until the 1970s). Black men convicted of raping white women could expect a death sentence, or in the event of jury discretion, a lengthy prison term. The processes of securing convictions and the sentencing of intra-racial rape offenders particularly in black-on-black cases were often arbitrary, blatantly misogynistic, and usually failed to deliver justice for the victim. Nevertheless, popular and official attitudes toward rape were changing in the southern states during the 1940s and 1950s as some governors were increasingly vexed by the disproportionate numbers of black men receiving death sentences for rape, particularly in interracial cases. Further, US Supreme Court jurist Arthur Goldberg’s 1962 pronouncement on the discriminatory imposition of the death penalty on “disadvantaged minorities” also signalled that legal views and interpretations were changing. This paper draws on death penalty case files and court files from Florida and Georgia in particular, newspaper reports of rape prosecutions in these and other southern states, governors’ reports and existing capital rape studies to examine the changing history of rape in the South in the post-war period and the impact on capital punishment, race, and rape. (Show less)

This paper draws on research carried out into around 5000 letters sent to successive Home Secretaries in mid twentieth-century Britain concerning capital cases. It examines examples of pro death penalty discourse in the letters as it was framed in relation to fears about safety and order in society. Although this was related to a belief that the death penalty could serve as a deterrent, the letters’ main arguments centre on the pace of social change, which was construed as making society more dangerous and insecure. The article highlights which aspects of social change were perceived as troubling, such as the behaviour of young people. It argues that the public responses articulated in the letters help to shed light on continuities in punitive discourse and anxieties about social change. Although criminological literature has frequently placed such sentiments within the context of social and cultural shifts in late modern societies since the 1960s or 1970s, attitudes expressed in the letters demonstrate that crime had a similar role as a condensing symbol for fears about social change in the 1940s and 1950s. (Show less)

In the initial aftermath of the Second World War, the Allies were united in their determination to punish the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities. Executing major Nazi war criminals was a key part of the Allies' denazification programme. Just as other physical reminders of the Third Reich were being expunged from the German landscape, so too were the criminal corpses expected to disappear from public memory, disposed of quietly through cremation or burial in unmarked graves. In reality, though, the process of administering the death penalty became extremely complicated. For example, the Allies underestimated the numbers of perpetrators involved and there was difficulty in securing suitably qualified personnel to carry out the executions. Further, when the newly-formed Federal Republic of Germany abolished capital punishment in 1949, tensions emerged between local German authorities and Allied military government officials who continued to pass death sentences. This paper explores the logistics of implementing capital punishment with particular reference to events in the British occupation zone between 1945 and 1951, and traces the debate between those who felt execution was the only suitable punishment for Nazi perpetrators, and those who argued that the abolition of the death penalty altogether was a necessary precondition for overcoming the injustices and inhumanity of the past, and distinguishing the new Germany from the murderous Hitler regime. (Show less)