Capital Punishment in UK Law

There is one other central objection to the creation of the wide basis of jurisdiction here contended for by the appellants under the rubric "control and authority", going beyond that arising in any of the narrowly recognised categories already discussed and yet short of that arising from the effective control of territory within the Council of Europe area.

It has however been recognised for very many years that the crime of murder embraces a range of offences of widely varying degrees of criminal culpability. It covers at one extreme the sadistic murder of a child for purposes of sexual gratification, a terrorist atrocity causing multiple deaths or a contract killing, at the other the mercy-killing of a loved one suffering unbearable pain in a terminal illness or a killing which results from an excessive response to a perceived threat.

A generous and purposive interpretation is to be given to constitutional provisions protecting human rights. The court has no licence to read its own predilections and moral values into the constitution, but it is required to consider the substance of the fundamental right at issue and ensure contemporary protection of that right in the light of evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society (see Trop v Dulles, above, at 101).

Initially, the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (1948) was not viewed as creating legal duties.

The contrary view would no doubt have been acceptable to those who argued for the retention of capital punishment for theft. How can yousay that there is any undue hardship in his being hanged? The hardship cannot be undue hardship because it is caused by his own faults I certainly cannot see anything in this Act which compels me to say that whatever the circumstances, a penalty of thousands of pounds should be exacted for a trivial piece of inadvertence which has done no one any harm.

I have to consider whether the interests of justice require the forfeiture rule to be modified in this case. The reforms introduced by the Homicide Act 1957 were designed to preserve certain classes of offender from capital punishment for killings carried out by reason of diminished responsibility or under provocation. I have reached the conclusion that, in the circumstances I have outlined in this Judgment, it does not.

The law expects people to exercise control over their emotions. A tendency to violent rages or childish tantrums is a defect in character rather than an excuse. The jury must think that the circumstances were such as to make the loss of self-control sufficiently excusable to reduce the gravity of the offence from murder to manslaughter.