Capital Punishment Page #5

"Capital Punishment" is not a direct title by Charles Dickens; however, themes surrounding capital punishment can be found in his works, particularly in "Oliver Twist" and "A Tale of Two Cities." In these novels, Dickens explores the moral implications of the death penalty, societal injustices, and the impact of crime and punishment on individuals and society. Through his vivid characters and compelling narratives, Dickens critiques the legal system of his time and advocates for social reform, emphasizing compassion and redemption over harsh retribution.

• Essay

								

    and executions in London and Middlesex, spread over a space of 32
    years, ending in 1842, divided into two cycles of 16 years each.
    In the first of these, 34 persons were convicted of murder, all of
    whom were executed.  In the second, 27 were convicted, and only 17
    executed.  The commitments for murder during the latter long
    period, with 17 executions, were more than one half fewer than they
    had been in the former long period with exactly double the number
    of executions.  This appears to us to be as conclusive upon our
    argument as any statistical illustration can be upon any argument
    professing to place successive events in the relation of cause and
    effect to each other.  How justly then is it said in that able and
    useful periodical work, now in the course of publication at Glasgow,
    under the name of the Magazine of Popular Information on Capital and
    Secondary Punishment, ‘the greater the number of executions, the
    greater the number of murders; the smaller the number of executions,
    the smaller the number of murders.  The lives of her Majesty’s
    subjects are less safe with a hundred executions a year than with
    fifty; less safe with fifty than with twenty-five.’”

Similar results have followed from rendering public executions more and
more infrequent, in Tuscany, in Prussia, in France, in Belgium.  Wherever
capital punishments are diminished in their number, there, crimes
diminish in their number too.

But the very same advocates of the punishment of Death who contend, in
the teeth of all facts and figures, that it does prevent crime, contend
in the same breath against its abolition because it does not!  “There are
so many bad murders,” say they, “and they follow in such quick
succession, that the Punishment must not be repealed.”  Why, is not this
a reason, among others, for repealing it?  Does it not go to show that
it is ineffective as an example; that it fails to prevent crime; and that
it is wholly inefficient to stay that imitation, or contagion, call it
what you please, which brings one murder on the heels of another?

One forgery came crowding on another’s heels in the same way, when the
same punishment attached to that crime.  Since it has been removed,
forgeries have diminished in a most remarkable degree.  Yet within five
and thirty years, Lord Eldon, with tearful solemnity, imagined in the
House of Lords as a possibility for their Lordships to shudder at, that
the time might come when some visionary and morbid person might even
propose the abolition of the punishment of Death for forgery.  And when
it was proposed, Lords Lyndhurst, Wynford, Tenterden, and Eldon—all Law
Lords—opposed it.

The same Lord Tenterden manfully said, on another occasion and another
question, that he was glad the subject of the amendment of the laws had
been taken up by Mr. Peel, “who had not been bred to the law; for those
who were, were rendered dull, by habit, to many of its defects!”  I would
respectfully submit, in extension of this text, that a criminal judge is
an excellent witness against the Punishment of Death, but a bad witness
in its favour; and I will reserve this point for a few remarks in the
next, concluding, Letter.

III

The last English Judge, I believe, who gave expression to a public and
judicial opinion in favour of the punishment of Death, is Mr. Justice
Coleridge, who, in charging the Grand Jury at Hertford last year, took
occasion to lament the presence of serious crimes in the calendar, and to
say that he feared that they were referable to the comparative
infrequency of Capital Punishment.

It is not incompatible with the utmost deference and respect for an
authority so eminent, to say that, in this, Mr. Justice Coleridge was not
supported by facts, but quite the reverse.  He went out of his way to
found a general assumption on certain very limited and partial grounds,
and even on those grounds was wrong.  For among the few crimes which he
instanced, murder stood prominently forth.  Now persons found guilty of
murder are more certainly and unsparingly hanged at this time, as the
Parliamentary Returns demonstrate, than such criminals ever were.  So how
can the decline of public executions affect that class of crimes?  As to
persons committing murder, and yet not found guilty of it by juries, they
escape solely because there are many public executions—not because there
are none or few.

But when I submit that a criminal judge is an excellent witness against
Capital Punishment, but a bad witness in its favour, I do so on more
broad and general grounds than apply to this error in fact and deduction
(so I presume to consider it) on the part of the distinguished judge in
question.  And they are grounds which do not apply offensively to judges,
as a class; than whom there are no authorities in England so deserving of
general respect and confidence, or so possessed of it; but which apply
alike to all men in their several degrees and pursuits.

It is certain that men contract a general liking for those things which
they have studied at great cost of time and intellect, and their
proficiency in which has led to their becoming distinguished and
successful.  It is certain that out of this feeling arises, not only that
passive blindness to their defects of which the example given by my Lord
Tenterden was quoted in the last letter, but an active disposition to
advocate and defend them.  If it were otherwise; if it were not for this
spirit of interest and partisanship; no single pursuit could have that
attraction for its votaries which most pursuits in course of time
establish.  Thus legal authorities are usually jealous of innovations on
legal principles.  Thus it is described of the lawyer in the Introductory
Discourse to the Description of Utopia, that he said of a proposal
against Capital Punishment, “‘this could never be so established in
England but that it must needs bring the weal-public into great jeopardy
and hazard’, and as he was thus saying, he shaked his head, and made a
wry mouth, and so he held his peace”.  Thus the Recorder of London, in
1811, objected to “the capital part being taken off” from the offence of
picking pockets.  Thus the Lord Chancellor, in 1813, objected to the
removal of the penalty of death from the offence of stealing to the
amount of five shillings from a shop.  Thus, Lord Ellenborough, in 1820,
anticipated the worst effects from there being no punishment of death for
stealing five shillings worth of wet linen from a bleaching ground.  Thus
the Solicitor General, in 1830, advocated the punishment of death for
forgery, and “the satisfaction of thinking” in the teeth of mountains of
evidence from bankers and other injured parties (one thousand bankers
alone!) “that he was deterring persons from the commission of crime, by
the severity of the law”.  Thus, Mr. Justice Coleridge delivered his
charge at Hertford in 1845.  Thus there were in the criminal code of
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