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Capital punishment was abolished in the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965. This was the result of changing attitudes towards the use of the death penalty.

Arguments in favour of the death penalty

• Some people saw the death penalty as a deterrent to serious crimes such as murder.
• Very few people were being executed per year. All those executed were convicted of murder.
• Only five crimes were capital crimes - murder, treason, piracy with violence, espionage, and burning down a weapons store or a navy dockyard. Only people convicted of very serious crimes could be executed. After 1957, only murder remained a capital crime. This meant that by the early 1960s the only executions that happened were for premeditated murders.

Arguments against the death penalty

• Wrongful convictions. There were well-publicised cases of people executed and later found to be innocent, eg Walter Rowland in 1947 and Timothy Evans in 1950.
• The cases of Derek Bentley, who was party to murder in 1952, and Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the UK, convinced many that the death penalty should be ended.
• Despite the death penalty, murder still happened. It did not seem to deter murderers.
• Increasingly people saw the death penalty as barbaric and uncivilised. Many other countries also ended the death penalty.