Capital Punishment in The UK Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Capital Punishment in The UK - Research Paper Example Capital punishment in the UK has a history dating back to several centuries. Initially, the punishment was meant for breaching royal ethics or disturbing the piece of administrative wings in the country. As stated in Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment Vol, 1 (2000, p.158) states, though England was the major influence on colonial America and the United States for their legal tradition, none of them ever carried out capital punishment with the same ferocity in their country as it was in England. Early days were notoriously remarkable with people getting hung for the crimes they had done. The punishment was in particular carried out by hanging the person proposed to death on the branch of a tree. Methods adopted to execute people were rather barbarian those days; apart from hanging, people were executed in various other ways like boiling, burning at the stake, decapitation and sometimes, drawing and quartering while still alive. England was historically considered to be the country t o facilitate the number of crimes than any other one on the face of the earth. According to Johnson & Zimring (2009), the capital punishments Britain carried out reflected the punishment policy it had adopted in colonies. The history of England reveals the prolific but horrifying fact that over 220 crimes were considered punishable by death. However, by 1957 death penalty was restricted to four types of offenses such as a) killing a policeman, b) killing during an armed robbery, c) killing by causing an explosion, and d) killing more than one person (Keene 2002). Critics were of the opinion that until 1957 the law itself gave more opportunity to people to commit capital crimes or was  widening its judicial areas where common people would trespass with their ultimate destiny of being caught after ‘committing’ the ‘capital crime’ in most cases because murder, burglary, and robbery were the commonest capital offenses those days. To illustrate, the law had no mercy upon child offenders. Children were commonly executed for mere stealing.