Abstract

The House of Lords debate of July last on the Death Penalty Abolition Bill 1 may prove to have been a landmark in British constitutional and legal history; certainly it was of the greatest interest as a specimen of current moral thinking and moral conflicts on the death penalty; and it is in this latter light that I shall discuss it here. Socialists and radicals might of course complain that a predominantly Conservative House of Lords could not be representative of current thinking; and they might contrast the voting for the second reading of Mr. Silverman's Bill in the Lords—Contents 95, Non-contents 238—with the votes that had previously been recorded in the Commons.