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OPINION
It is clear that ‘bringing back hanging’ has returned to the political agenda.
When a Sudanese refugee was caught attacking a man in Belfast on June 8, Restore, a far-right party, pledged: “A Restore Britain government will put murderous third-world savages to death”.
This may prove a vote-winner in next week’s important Makerfield by-election.
The party is led by wealthy businessman (and former prominent member of Reform UK) Rupert Lowe, who also appears to be very tech-savvy.
In a widely-watched YouTube video he laid out an uncompromising blueprint to ‘save’ Britain which included letting the people decide on Capital Punishment.
Together with Reform UK, they could force other parties apart from Labour to trail in their wake.
A recent poll by Survation put them third on eight per cent of the vote, Reform UK second on 39 per cent, with Labour on 49.
It has designs far beyond Makerfield too. “We are going to stand somebody in every seat”, Mr Lowe has said of the next General Election (GE), which is due by 2029.
Let’s turn now to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Mr Farage has said he wants to abolish the Human Rights Act.
This is a UK domestic law that incorporates most of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
It underlines 16 fundamental protections in the UK including the right to life, and protocol 13 of the convention prohibits the restoration of the death penalty as long as the UK is a party to it (regardless of the UK’s status in relation to the European Union [EU]).
However I have a major problem with the ‘bring back hanging’ argument. The state could kill the WRONG person!
After covering innumerable miscarriage of justice cases, I know better than most people, that the person convicted is not always guilty.
It is bad enough that the innocent person might have spent many years in jail wrongly, but it could be even worse if hanging was restored…
In one case I was lucky enough to be part of a team which found new evidence leading to the release of a man from prison, after he spent 11 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit.
Mike O’Brien saw many terrible things in prison following his wrongful conviction, and his health has been ruined as a result.
It could, though, have been far worse, and in the past it has been, with controversies about police actions to the fore.
In September 1952 Mahmoud Mattan became the last man to be executed at Cardiff Prison, but Mr Mahmood had in fact been framed by the police and 70 years later South Wales Police (SWP) formally apologised to his family for his wrongful conviction.
These aren’t the only worrying cases involving Welsh people either.
Timothy Evans who was born near Merthyr Tydfil was hanged in 1950, for murders committed by the serial killer Reg ‘John’ Christie, and in January 2003, the Home Office (HO) awarded his half-sister, Mary Westlake, as well as his sister, Eileen Ashby, ex gratia payments as compensation for this miscarriage of justice.
An independent legal assessor for the HO accepted that “the conviction and execution of Timothy Evans for the murder of his child was wrongful and a miscarriage of justice” and that “there is no evidence to implicate Timothy Evans in the murder of his wife. She was most probably murdered by Christie”.
Appalling events like these, are the reason that I will NEVER support bringing back hanging…
Details of Phil’s, astonishing decades-long journalistic career (including some of the miscarriage of justice cases he has covered), as he was gripped by the rare neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in an important book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Next week – why critics are speculating whether this may even be the LAST ever FIFA World Cup because the governing body, as well as the tournament itself, has been hit with so many scandals.
