THE COST

A OF
CRIME
By Norman St. John-Stevas, M.P.
THE second reading of the Bill to abolish capital punishment was carried in the House of Commons by an unexpectedly large majority just before Christmas. but the Bill still has some major obstacles to overcome before it becomes law. As soon as Parliament reassembles in the third week in January it will be considered "upstairs" in Committee and those who opposed or were doubtful about the Bill will have the opportunity to propose amendments.
Then it will return to the Commons for further debate on the Report stage and after that it will have to get through the Lords. The Upper House would be extremely foolish to reject the Bill in view of the huge majority for it in the Commons.
The House of Lords suspensory veto should be used only where a measure has a very small majority in the Commons and there is evidence that the Commons minority has strong barking in the country. The Tory Party has no intention of trying to mobilise the peers against the Bill, but as there will be a free vote there is nothing to stop the "backwoodsmen" turning up and throwing the Bill out.
Provided that all goes well with the Bill the question then has to be faced as to what is to replace capital punishment in our legal system. I am not a believer in the retributive theory of punishment in the normally accepted sense of the term but it does include two important underlying truths which I do accept.
The first is that only those responsible for a crime should be punished for committing it. At first sight this seems obvious but there have been judicial systems (such as the Nazi hostage system) which kept law and order by punishing those who had no connection with the crime at all.
Secondly there should he some proportion between the crime committed and the punishment imposed. The public feel quite rightly that it is wrong that a serious offence should be punished with a trivial penalty. Where there is much misconception is in the current belief that murderers not hanged get off lightly and are liable to he released after only a short stay in prison. 'Ibis simply isn't true.
It is commonly asserted, for instance, that the average sentence of imprisonment served by a murderer under a "life" sentence is nine years. '1here is however no such thing as an "average" sentence, which is a statistical abstraction.
The "average" included mercy killers who may serve less than a year and those who commit premeditated murders in the course, say, of armed robbery, and who may serve 12 years or more. There is the further point that the "average" of nine years refers to • pre-1957 practice when there were far fewer life sentences, and murderers under the present system may well be serving longer sentences than in the past.
Nor is there any reason for regarding a period in prison for nine years as trivial. By our law the longest sentence that can be statutorily imposed on any one count is 14 years, and if allowance is made for remission of sentence for good conduct then the term served in practice works out at just over nine years.
Thus even under the pre1957 practice the average sentence for murderers worked out as equivalent at least to the heaviest sentence imposed for other crimes and some murderers served considerably longer.
Finally I believe that the period of punishment should be fixed by the co-operation of the courts and the Executive. Normally in order to safeguard liberty and human rights all punishment for crime should be a matter for judicial decision or at least review, but murder is in a category by itself.
The murderer has to he punished and the public has to be protected. You can only fulfil these two aims by a high degree of flexibility in sentencing. To impose a rigidly fixed statutory penalty would make the achievement of public protection more, not less difficult.
I see no reason, therefore, why the period a murderer serves should not be left in the hands of the Home Secretary who is the person best equipped to judge the moment when Et murderer can safely he released to take his place in society once again.