In response to the heinous crimes committed by Axel Rudakubana, who was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 52 years, the Reform UK MPs Rupert Lowe and Richard Tice led calls for a “national debate” on restoring the death penalty. Their colleague Lee Anderson went further, posting an image of a noose on X with the comment “this is what is required”. But to grant Anderson’s wish would fly in the face of a swelling global movement towards abolition, and would not only be wrong but in the end, I believe, deeply unpopular.
Both Labour and the Tories have long been committed to abolishing the death penalty worldwide, and Downing Street made clear that the Government had no intention of joining the debate demanded by Reform. However, its MPs’ position may well get support from some of the many expressing concern over the purported “leniency” of Rudakubana’s punishment. Mr Justice Goose imposed the harshest sentence the law allows for a person who commits an offence as a juvenile — Rudakubana had been nine days short of his 18th birthday — and pointed out he is unlikely ever to be released. Nevertheless, Lowe claimed that “exceptional circumstances” demand “exceptional punishments”.
Capital punishment was abolished in Britain for ordinary offences in 1969 following a four-year moratorium, and for the rare crimes of mutiny and treason in 1998. In 1999, the UK ratified Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Second Optional Protocol of the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which means it could not restore the death penalty without denouncing them in their entirety. The last time Parliament debated capital punishment in 1998 MPs’ rejected it by a majority of 158, and despite the concerns over Rudakubana’s sentence, there is little sign of a groundswell in favour of bringing it back. Anderson’s tweet may have got 2.8 million impressions, but only 61,000 likes. Back in 2020, an online petition to restore capital punishment attracted just 12,691 signatures.
When Britain abolished capital punishment, it was in the global minority, but by the time it signed the relevant conventions 29 years later, there were 89 abolitionist nations. Today that figure stands at 128, a total joined just weeks ago by Zimbabwe, which in the past, was not known for its human rights record. Another 43 are what the UN terms “abolitionist de facto”, which means they have not executed anyone for at least 10 years.
One of the most compelling forces behind the shift in international attitudes has been increasing recognition of the potential for error. As they once were in Britain, where Timothy Evans was posthumously pardoned in 1966, 16 years after he was hanged for a murder committed by someone else, wrongfully convicted defendants have been sentenced to death and some have been executed in most retentionist countries. Possible innocence is not a feature of Rudakubana’s case, but where the death penalty remains in law, innocent people will be killed by the state, and it would be a moral disaster to allow his crimes to open the door to the wrongful judicial killing of other, future defendants.
The most common argument advanced by death penalty advocates is the claim that it is a unique and powerful deterrent — an appealing rationale in countries with high levels of violent crime, particularly following a heinous case. However, research in the US and elsewhere has not found any credible evidence to support this position.
Since Rudakubana was sentenced, some have suggested that at a time of fiscal restraint, the state should not bear the high cost of keeping prisoners incarcerated for the rest of their lives. It is grotesque and inappropriate to reduce a debate that involves profound issues about state power and the right to life to questions of cost, even if it were true that the death penalty might be cheaper than life in prison. However, in countries such as the US, which at least try to ensure procedural safeguards for those at risk of capital punishment and several ways to appeal, the death penalty costs more than life imprisonment. If Reform UK’s MPs wish to make this case, they will be on shaky ground.
The horror of Rudakubana’s crimes will not be forgotten. They were, as Mr Justice Goose made clear, “evil”. But to restore capital punishment would be an even greater evil, which unlike his crimes, we have the means to prevent.
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SubscribeHere’s a thought experiment. Do not bring back capital punishment as a routine response. Only consider it as a punishment for the second offence.
This reduces considerably the fear that an innocent person may be wrongly convicted and executed, but also reduces the risk that a convicted murderer will keep killing. either in prison, or on release.
Part of the problem is right there in your last word. A life sentence no longer means life.
It whole be interesting to have this “professor’s” viewpoint of fast tracking the state killing of elderly, disabled and mentally ill people to save money, and the sacred NHS.
How do these people make their decisions? I think it’s very simple: they ask themselves, “What would the average Daily Mail reader think?” and then do the opposite. Killing the old and innocent is fine—either explicitly or through weak justice policies—because that’s what Daily Mail readers don’t want. But executing a genocidal racist who kills babies is bad, because that’s what Daily Mail readers do want.
I think the term “the banality of evil” applies here. Blind ideological attachment is the banality of evil, and this author embodies it. They may not intend to be evil, but they are complicit in evil because of their actions.
Cognitive dissonance alert!
Why would anyone want to bring back capital punishment for, just more, ‘heinous crimes’?
Of course there is no reason to.
But what about an Islamic terrorist going on a knife rampage in a Taylor Swift dance class for 30 very young girls? Then you have a case.
But Unherd has made it very clear of course this had nothing to do with Ialamic terrorism…
Deal with that Unherd commenters. If any oc you can.
Mandatory capital punishment is a significant deterrent. In the U.S., there’s little deterrence because only a minuscule fraction of criminals are executed each year.
Mistakes? Mistakes happen under the current system as well. The question is not whether mistakes are acceptable, but which mistakes—and in what numbers. Mandatory capital punishment would save far more innocent lives than the horror story of modern British justice, where weak, permissive policies result in tens of thousands of crimes annually, including the most serious offences.
By adopting ‘compassionate’ justice, the state effectively allows innocent people to be subjected to rape, violence, and worse. The principle is simple: when the consequences of crime are reduced, crime increases—and innocent people pay the price.
So spare me the moral posturing. Your so-called compassion isn’t about caring for people; it’s about ideology.
The Communism excuse. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s just that it hasn’t been tried properly yet. If you’re not getting results you were hoping for then simply double down and go even harder, that’s sure to fix things!
The only valid argument of a possible judicial error against capital punishment is constantly misused. Even the author admits that this argument isn’t working in this case with abundance of evidence. And what is the possibility of an error for repeated offenders? Why should we provide dental care for life for a repeated rapist? Also the argument about cost only demonstrates the brokenness of the system .
”mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent” Adam Smith.
If the argument that the re-introduction of capital punishment shouldn’t be considered on the grounds that it’s ‘thought’ to be cheaper than keeping someone incarcerated for decades, neither can it be any kind of argument not to re-introduce it on the grounds it’d be more expensive.
I know that’s not what this article is arguing (after following the link) but let’s therefore consider the “moral” case for it’s abolition. Is it really a greater punishment than incarceration for life? On what grounds? And to whom?
I’m not advocating for either case, but i don’t really think the debate has been as fully explored recently as it might’ve been. Opinions change. If a referendum were to be held, and the result enacted into law (if a change was required), then it wouldn’t be “the state” that would be held accountable but the popular vote. This could be held every 10/15/20 years, and if done online (with relevant safeguards), at little cost.
As for having to withdraw from a whole tranche of globalist legal frameworks should we decide on its re-introduction… so what?
I didn’t expect other article from Carolyn Hoyle, director of the Death Penalty Research Unit. She gets paid to write exactly this. But let me express my opinion. I’m not getting paid for this.
First. I do not deny the fact that the death penalty does not deter new murderers. But let me ask, how many murderers, even those whose crimes have caused a great public outcry, have been released and, sometimes almost immediately, have committed new murders? For some reason, in the works of opponents of the death penalty, no one touches on this insignificant question. I would like to compare the number of such cases with the number of judicial errors in the imposition of the death penalty. I am afraid that the statistics will be depressing for the esteemed Carolyn.
Second. About feelings. Probably I am not a humanist in the sense that the reasoning, feelings and signals of virtue from respected professors and the most humane correspondents have no significance for me in comparison with the feelings of the parents of little girls and the feelings of that woman who shielded the children with her body.
This creature should be hanged
I can’t imagine that Rudakubana arrived at the conclusion that there needs to be a ‘genocide of white people’ through a deep study of history, so where did the idea come from? The Internet? Perhaps – but just as likely from his school teachers.
It would be unjust to put him to death simply for carrying the logic of post-modern multiculturalism to its logical conclusion.
I have to agree that such ideologies as CRT theory, de-colonisation dogma and such like has lent a false legitimacy to hatred and/or resentment of white people. Misplaced grievance has been seeded by a far left intent on destroying the west and imposing communism/globalisation. The left cannot bear to admit the consequences of their own ill conceived actions. Personally, I believe this responsibility now lies at the very highest levels of the state, media and government. Bringing back the death penalty will do next to nothing to arrest the terrible trajectory we are on. It is going to take brutal honesty in debate followed by the rescinding of much that was put in action years ago. I just don’t know how we succeed with that.
Don’t make rash decisions when emotions running hot is as true for ourselves as it is for Public Policy.
Looking at Homicide rates, UK continues to internationally have one of the lowest rates per capita. The trend was a gradual increase to late 90s and then a marked fall through to mid 2010’s. It is up a bit more recently Knives the main weapon and about half related to drugs. There is much more one can ponder when looking at the stats. An irrefutable argument for a return of the Death penalty is missing but certainly knife crime amongst the young a worrying trend with which we have to urgently grapple.
I wonder if there is anyone reading this Article who’ll still be alive when Rudakubana comes up for parole? He’s a psychopath and one wonders if anything would have deterred other than lifting him off the street and holding him somewhere secure. The Public Inquiry will tell us more.
The Public Inquiry will tell us what the Powers That Be wish us to know.
Calling him a ‘psychopath’ does not address the question as to why he chose to murder small white girls at a dance class. However psychotic he is it’s fatuous to pretend there is no ideological content in what he did.
He seems to have taken from quite a smorgasbord of hate filled ideologies from the reporting to date. Again we should hear more via the Inquiry, although apparently Google not being helpful on sharing his account details.
Those driven by Islamist ideology have tendency to commit their horrors whilst shouting ‘allahu akbar’. He doesn’t seem to have said anything like this. Again though we’ll hear more in due course.
There were earlier reports he had shouted just that. He is now reportedly attending prayers at a `mosque’ in prison.
If he is psychotic, then the ideological material would just fuel the psychosis, not vice-versa. N’est-ce-pas?
Take the case of someone who is certain to be guilty, and has committed a crime as in the recent case. Does support for abolition amount to anything more than virtue signalling?
This is very confusing Unherd. Didn’t Rudakubana have mental health problems?
There’s no reason to hang him.
Or is there?
He was deemed responsible enough to face trial. This whole mental health issue seems like a ploy to get into a more convivial prison or have his sentencing squashed.
It seems Unherd has trouble pinpointing the real issue here.
What a surprise.
What does a country do when its children are 1. Desexed in Gender clinics? 2. Stabbed and maimed and their throats cut by Islamic terrorists? 3. Drugged and raped by Pakistani rape gangs?
In England. You do nothing.
And on top of if all the mainstream media will deflect any attention away from what is going on. Welcome to England. Welcome to Unherd.
The Prof has perhaps not considered that given the state of Britain’s prisons, the unlikelihood of their betterment, and the length of the Welsh individual’s sentence, that an unofficial sentence of this sort might be carried out.
The rationale of weighing up the consequences of committing a capital crime is unlikely to be made by someone mentally ill.
The memory of these Southport girls are sullied every time someone riding a hobby horse – be it capital punishment, not capital punishment, immigration, drugs, the Labour government, or whatever – uses this horror as a stage to canter around on it.
It would be odd if a person with an unhinged obsession with death and who was prepared to mete it out unmercifully and unrepentantly was met with death administered by the state.
Just as odd as those who have previously argued that a life sentence in jail of the sort that the fallen Welsh cherub will endure is cruel compared to a death sentence and who are now silent about the ‘mercifulness’ of capital punishment by comparison.
The Prof’s conclusion is a bit muddled. ‘We can prevent such crimes’ but cannot prevent the ‘evil’ of capital punishment. But surely as the Prof has argued, (the return of) capital punishment has already been prevented.
The death penalty would of course prevent the UK joining the EU.
Morally I’ve no real problem with the death penalty, there are plenty of people who deserve to swing, but I wouldn’t want to see it reintroduced.
Firstly I don’t believe it’s a deterrent. Countries that have it often still have higher murder rates than those that don’t, which would suggest socioeconomic factors (and possibly a belief you won’t get caught due to a lack of police) play a more important role than any possible punishment.
Secondly I don’t believe it would be evenly applied. A rich person with a decent solicitor would be much less likely to receive it than a poor kid from a council estate, even if both crimes were identical.
Lastly as was mentioned, if you hang the wrong person there’s no way of ever correcting that mistake
Lee Anderson likes to suggest that his two previous parties left him, but there is no way that he was in favour of capital punishment in 2018 as a 51-year-old Labour councillor on the staff of a Labour MP. Even if the death penalty were available, then it would never be permitted for anyone who had pleaded guilty to something that he had done when he was 17. As with a whole life order, the line has to be somewhere.
The restoration of capital punishment would effectively decriminalise murder. Even if the legislation provided for it, then no judge could conceivably accept a majority verdict in a capital trial. In the Britain of the twenty-first century, there would always be at least one of 12 randomly assembled members of the general public who would vote to acquit anyone rather than risk the imposition of the death penalty. In fact, there would always be at least two or three. Those who wanted to bring back what they saw as higher qualifications for jurors would, if anything, increase that number.
If there were never any realistic possibility of a conviction for murder, then no one would ever be charged with it. Instead, ways would be found of convicting murderers of manslaughter, resentment of the injustice of which we saw in Nottingham this time last year. So convicted, they would almost certainly be released earlier than if their records were of intentional homicide. Britain would become a very much more dangerous place.
In any case, who among the kind of people who became judges in today’s Britain would ever impose the death penalty? Who among the kind of people who became prosecutors in today’s Britain would ever seek its imposition, or chance that by bringing a charge of murder? Even if there were a high likelihood of conviction. Indeed, especially so, on principle. Elect them, you say? Well, Members of Parliament are elected, and they rejected capital punishment by 403 votes to 159 the last time that the House of Commons divided on it at all. Under a Conservative Government. 31 years ago.
The remaining proponents of the death penalty would support it only for certain classes of murder. Yet that whole concept was used in 1969 as the definitive argument for making permanent its 1965 suspension. The alternative, it was argued, would have been a reversion to the 1957 Homicide Act, with its intolerable obscenity of, yes, different classes of murder, some of which were capital offences while others were not. Thus was it declared better, or at least not as bad, to murder one person rather than another. Between 1957 and 1965, there were two executions per year, a kind of symbolic blood sacrifice return to which would have been, and would be, grotesque. That was the knockdown argument for getting rid of the whole thing forever, and it still is.
That, and the suggestion from Willie Ross, Harold Wilson’s only ever Secretary of State for Scotland, that if execution were to be retained, then it ought to be carried out on television. That unanswerable line shocked a number of waverers into the Aye Lobby. Ross, who was also a staunch opponent both of devolution and of EEC membership, was no liberal, having tried to ban ITV from carrying advertisements on Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday.
Nor was the Home Secretary in 1969 Roy Jenkins, but Jim Callaghan, who had previously been Parliamentary Adviser to the Police Federation. Callaghan pointed out that there had been no increase in the murder rate since the suspension. If the figures for violent crime are much higher today, then that is because all sorts of extreme violence is no longer tolerated, or at least not as much as it was. In the days that half or more of the remaining supporters of the death penalty were coming of age, then those acts might officially have been illegal, although even that was not always the case, but they were treated in most or all ways as if they were perfectly within the law.
People were formed by the brutality of daily school violence (including corporal punishment, which was so ubiquitous that it was obviously a complete failure in its own terms), of socially respectable domestic violence, of regular fights at work, of routine fights of what would now be a very uncommon ferocity in and around pubs, of National Service, and so on, all against the ever-present societal memory of the War and of mass pre-War deaths from poverty-related illnesses or from the lack of workers’ protection. That made them, well, how does one put this nicely? One cannot. At some level, life was just cheaper to them.
“Centrist” opponents of the death penalty nevertheless have their wars, their self-indulgent refusal to enforce the drug laws, their Police brutality and other street violence, their numerous life-shortening consequences of economic inequality, their abortions, at least putatively their euthanasia, and so on. They must answer for themselves on those points, as must opponents of those things who would support capital punishment, although in my 30-year experience in the pro-life movement that oft-alleged position is practically unheard of. We have no case to answer to either of those charges. The argument being made that it would be cheaper to execute Axel Rudakubana is Kit Malthouse’s argument for assisted suicide.
Enoch Powell always did oppose the death penalty, and I have found that, perhaps in reaction to neoconservative bloodthirstiness, American paleoconservatives are at least as likely to oppose it as to support it. Traditional conservatives may be, with Muslims, the people most likely to think that there were an argument in favour of the principle, but they would also be two of the three groups most likely to be on the receiving end if it were ever brought back. The Old Right may talk about safeguards of this, that or the other variety, but they know that if those had been possible, then there would never have been abolition. They themselves would not have been executed in those days, but that just made them privileged, and they are more and more conscious of being from the other side of the tracks these days. Who among them would not be branded a “misfit” or a “loner” by Keir Starmer?
The third category of likely victims of restored capital punishment would be the Left, a section of which, on this as on the nuclear weapons to which Powell was also implacably opposed, used to be open to the charge of hypocrisy on this matter, since it did not seem to mind either of them in countries of which it approved. Still, that was only ever a section of the Left, even if it was quite a large section at one time, and on both points it would be vanishingly small now. There are some Muslims against whom the claim could be made, but the screaming hypocrites about the death penalty are still the liberal supporters of military interventionism, and now also of assisted suicide.
Don’t bring back the death penalty for Axel Rudakubana, bring it back for anyone who commits murder in the first degree.
Maybe capital punichment is too ‘un-Christian’, (unlike assisted dying)
in which case why not blind him and burn out his tongue?
Many good points made in the comments below. But I am struck by the fact that, as far as I can tell, not one person here has opposed the death penalty on the grounds that killing people is wrong.
I oppose the death penalty on that basis. I just can’t get past giving the state the right to kill you is not only wrong, but a very bad idea (likewise soi disant “assisted death”).
That is my fundamental objection to the death penalty. I think it is morally wrong.
I admit the Southport case stretches that belief but ultimately, I do not believe the state has the right to impose such a sanction.
I’ll tell you straight. Our current PM or whoever might follow him IS GOING TO BRING BACK the DEATH PENALTY. It’s not an IF it’s a WHEN. I’m almost tempted to think that this whole incident was set up to ENABLE the reintroduction. I know thats horrific,would our caring,safety conscious public servants who love us,do that. Yes,because they don’t consider themselves our servants but our Masters and they don’t love us. Even before the last GE Sir Keir Starmer had sent a research group to study the Prison System in – Texas! He wants to identify what to they get so right
And as Rachel told us,we have a £22million black hole. Long term imprisonment costs too much. So you see I’m right. The DEATH PENALTY is coming back and our favourite smiley Jewess Dame Ratsbreath is ALL FOR IT.
So the deaths of 3 small girls was a plot to bring back the death penalty? Geez, liberals are stupider than I thought. Jew-haters also.
For me the only moral problem with a death penalty is the risk of hanging an innocent person. If no doubt of guilt then fine as fair, cheaper, safer for citizens etc
However there are multiple practical issues : courts unwilling to apply the death penalty, which crimes, execution method etc.
Maybe it’s sadly just not practical in the real world.
The risk of executing innocent people is real. But you can’t also get back 10, 20 or 40 years of your life after getting a wrong conviction over-turned years later.
If we are talking death penalty only for exceptional cases such as this one – child killing or terrorism, uncontested guilt, no apparent mental illness (since that was not claimed as a defence) – then the actual application would be extremely limited. I too have no problem with that. Especially as the majority of terrorist killers are thoughtful enough to take the decision out of our hands or get themselves shot by the police.
So you sympathize with child killers ? I do not.
Fry this POS. There is no need to have a fake mercy for him. He is an evil person. Fry him.
“The most common argument advanced by death penalty advocates is the claim that it is a unique and powerful deterrent …”
The ‘deterrent’ argument is a red herring. Whether the death penalty is a deterrent or not is irrelevant in these most heinous cases, such as that of the Southport Monster. This sort of extreme killing, in which there is 100% certainty of guilt, are so abhorrent and utterly foul that their perpetrators should forfeit their human right to continued life upon conviction. These personifications of pure evil should be allowed one appeal within a two-month deadline; and if these fail, then they should be executed the following day after their appeal is dismissed, their corpses then immediately incinerated and their ashes scattered in some secret location at sea within 24 hours of death.
A decent, civilised society should identify behavioural boundaries beyond which any vestige of human right to life is not tolerated. We need intolerance of the right kind; not just tolerance at any cost – the mantra with which we are brainwashed constantly by the Woking Class Establishment. We do not want these vile malignancies incarcerated in our midst, costing millions in their upkeep and always facing the prospect that some panel of Woking Class elites, committed to human rights for all, may eventually free them on parole or release them early.
No! Bring back the death penalty now! Our leaders should urgently enact legislation permanently to rid us of such malevolent vermin. I bet a significant majority of the UK public would vote for such a measure.
If someone who is immature, and incapable of behaving rationally commits serious crimes, does he deserve the death penalty? Is revenge a sufficient reason for using it? Should the effect on the families of executed persons be taken into account? Henry Fielding knew in the eighteenth century that hanging did not work as a deterrent, but it was a long time before this was acknowledged. Restoring it now would be to react emotionally, when we know that it cannot be justified.
when the death penalty was abolished, the British public was promised that there would be whole life sentences, that murderers would never be released. If the politicians had kept their word we wouldn’t be having the discussion right now.
Between the 1957 Homicide Act (which tightened up the types of murder which would be punished by death – murder of policeman, murder during a robbery, multiple murder etc) and the Murder Act of 1965 which ended capital punishment, 32 men were executed. All of their cases were subject to multiple inquiries and investigations. None of them was ever shown to be a miscarriage of justice. The most famous, James Hanratty, the A6 Murderer, after a long campaign to prove his supposed innocence, was found to have committed the crime through DNA techniques which were not available in 1962.
Between 2010 and 2020 two people per year were killed by men who had been previously convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Makes you think!
Just consider him deeply and irreversibly depressed and humanely euthanize him. Don’t wait till he’s 90. Send him to Canada if you have to.
Your ideology is inhuman towards victims, and unjust for society.
Is life precious? If someone takes a life, their life is literally the only price that is in the same category of restitution. That’s the message that society has chosen to uphold for millennia. But with some bad data science and rationalization, you argue for devaluing life and reducing the meaning of murder.
> However, research in the US and elsewhere has not found any credible evidence to support this position.
The government of Singapore disagrees. Why does that country have next to zero problem with drugs? Simple, because they hang drug mules — promptly, but after a fair trial and with all mitigating circumstances considered. And very few people want to risk the dangle. Yes, Axel should hang within a month.