The slippery slope to the return of the death penalty

Parliament has voted to proceed with Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill, which will see the NHS offer terminally ill people the opportunity to kill themselves and the lethal drugs with which to do so. The debate over assisted suicide is complex and often heated, with sincere and well-intentioned people approaching its profound moral and ethical quandaries from very different but passionately held perspectives. I would like to set those questions aside for now and ask a different but related one: if the state can help end the lives of terminally ill people, why shouldn’t it end the lives of murderers?

The last time capital punishment was used in the UK was 1964. It was suspended the following year and abolished for murder in 1969 (1973 in Northern Ireland). A handful of crimes including treason remained capital offences but the death penalty was removed entirely from the statute books in 1998.