APPENDIX D
EXECUTIONS
The accompanying letter from Mr. A. Chichele Plowden, one of the Metropolitan Police Magistrates, appeared in The Times for December 20, 1910.
EXECUTIONS
To the Editor of The Times
Sir,—The interesting letters which have lately appeared in your columns on the above subject were bound sooner or later to resolve themselves into the one question of really national importance—viz., whether or not capital punishment by hanging is to be the last word of our civilization in dealing with the crime of murder.
It is to the credit of Sir Henry Smith, whose letter you published on Friday, that he is quick to recognize that this is the only thing that signifies. Nor can it be said that there is any ambiguity whatever in his own views on the subject.
Sir Henry is quite clear that all sympathy with murderers, even in exceptional cases where they “suffer terribly,” is thrown away. Generally speaking, they suffer very little—less than many innocent people who die in their beds. Nevertheless the rope remains as the great deterrent. The rope it is that is anticipated with terror.
If this is, as I believe it to be, a correct summary of Sir Henry’s views, perhaps you will allow me, as a confirmed disbeliever in the efficacy of capital punishment, to make one or two comments, not the less true because they must often have been made before. People, of course, are at liberty to think and believe that there would be more murders than there are if hanging were abolished; but except from analogy with foreign countries, notably, perhaps, with France, where capital punishment, after being abolished, has recently been restored, there is absolutely no evidence, nor in the nature of things can there be any, to show that the rope is a deterrent.
If there are any whom the fear of it has deterred from murder, they are and must remain an unknown quantity. All we know, as distinguished from conjecture, is that crimes for which capital punishment used to be the penalty have sensibly diminished, and that murders continue to afflict society in quite sufficient numbers to unnerve the more timid members of the community—the fear of death notwithstanding.
It is a popular fallacy to regard a murderer as the worst of criminals. The real truth is that in many cases it is hardly fair to describe him as a criminal at all. There is nothing inconsistent, human nature being what it is, in a man of blameless antecedents being driven in a moment of frenzy into committing an act of violence from which his whole soul would recoil in his saner moments.
No one who has not been through the fire can tell what may be the effect on his self-control of a long course of studied insults and provocation on the part of a worthless wife against her husband persevered in day by day, for months and even years at a stretch.
Sir Henry Smith, in his virtuous indignation with Crippen, makes no allowance for desperate circumstances like these. He is angry with Crippen on account of his coolness in the witness-box, which he calls an outrage, and he apparently regards it as a distinct aggravation of his conduct that he should have sworn to love and cherish at the altar the wife whom he subsequently put to death.
It is somewhat amazing to me that considerations such as these should weigh for a moment in any just appreciation of Crippen’s character.
They seem to me absolutely irrelevant.
What Crippen actually did, and for which he suffered death, was to kill a wife whom he hated for the sake of a woman whom he loved. Probably of all the murders that are committed under the sun, in one country or another, there is no more common type of murder than this.
It was the irony of Crippen’s fate that he did not meet No. 2 until after he had met No. 1. Had such been his good fortune he would probably have lived a life not better nor worse than his neighbours, and have enjoyed with the best of them the reputation of a contented, law-abiding citizen.
It must not be supposed from these observations that, the law of the land being what it is, Crippen deserved a lesser punishment than he received. All I am concerned with is to dispute that any fear of his fate by hanging had any effect on his mind or intentions when he resolved upon the murder of his wife.
It is quite clear that the deterrent effect was nil, as it was in the case of Dickman, of Cream, and the host of other murderers, who, with a full appreciation that they may ultimately be hung, have nevertheless not hesitated to do away with the lives of their victims, and to run the risk.
I am convinced from such experience as I have had of Criminal Courts, extending over many years, that what a man murderously inclined really dreads is not death, but pain.
The spectre of death, though it can always be conjured up, is too remote and shadowy to have much effect on the nerves of a man in the enjoyment of a full and vigorous health. Not so with pain. There is no imagination so dull that it cannot take in the terrors of the “cat;” and I believe if such a punishment could be made part of the sentence, even without abolishing capital punishment, the deterrent effect would be unmistakable.
I think even Crippen’s courage, wonderful as it was, would have quailed on that dark and wintry morning had he known that he would have had to endure a flogging before he was hung. And had he been asked which he feared most—the physical pain of the lash or the death to follow—can any one doubt what his answer would have been?
I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
A. Chichele Plowden.
Marylebone Police Court.
“The Home Secretary states in a printed reply to Mr. Palmer that of the 24 men and 4 women sentenced to death in 1910, 16 men were executed, as compared with 27 men and 4 women sentenced to death in 1909, 19 men being executed. In 1908, 23 men and 2 women were sentenced to death, 12 men suffering the extreme penalty. One man sentenced to death in 1908 was executed in 1909.” (Daily Newspaper.)