Death Penalty Limitation
The appointment of a Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, limited by the terms of reference announced by the Prime Minister last week, will not satisfy most of the Members who formed the majority which voted for the abolition of the death penalty in the House of Commons last year. The Commission, which will have an excellent chairman in Sir Ernest Gowers, is to consider modi- fications and limitations of the liability to suffer capital punishment, and the length of imprisonment which might in appropriate cases be substituted, and to " inquire into and take account of " the position in other countries. This is in line with the compromise put forward by the Home Secretary, and unfavourably received, after the abolition clause had been carried by the Commons and rejected by the Lords. The differentiation then proposed between degrees of murder was generally regarded as unsatisfactory, though in fact there was a good deal to be said for it, and it is along these lines that the Commission is invited to pursue its investigations. The Prime Minister was on firm ground in submitting that the total abolition of capital punishment was an issue for Parliament itself rather than the Commission ; it is, moreover, an issue on which the data are generally known and on which the opinion of individual members of the Commission would be worth no more than that of individual Members of Parliament.
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