capital punishment

capital punishment. Although monetary payment could atone for almost any crime under native Irish law, an offender unable to pay was liable to slavery or the death penalty. The death penalty (normally hanging) was also the standard punishment under the common law of the medieval lordship for a range of serious offences, including homicide, arson, robbery, and theft, though ordained clerics were exempt from such punishments by virtue of benefit of clergy and many other offenders received pardons. A 1495 statute made premeditated murder into a form of treason. Down to 1791 convicted male murderers were therefore liable to drawing and quartering as well as hanging; female offenders were liable to burning.

The use of capital punishment was also affected by the distinction made under the common law of the medieval lordship of Ireland between those who lived under English law (not just those of English origin, but also those of Irish origin who had obtained the right to use English law) and the ‘pure’ Irish. It was only a felony to kill members of the first group; killing a ‘pure’ Irishman (even one normally resident within the lordship) was at most a civil offence, for which compensation was payable at a fixed rate. This went not to the family of the victim, but to his lord. The difference in treatment attracted contemporary as well as later criticism and from figures as different as Sir John Davies and James Connolly. It did not wholly disappear until the 16th century.

During the early modern period benefit of clergy became available to almost all first offenders (including women as from 1634), but as the death penalty was extended to a wider range of offences the more serious also generally ceased to be ‘clergiable’. During the 18th century, it became common to commute many death sentences to transportation; long terms of imprisonment became the norm for most offences only from the 1820s onwards. A series of statutes between 1832 and 1837, paralleling English reforms, abolished capital punishment for most offences other than treason and murder. Up to the late 1840s executions nevertheless remained significantly more common, in relation to population, than they were in England; from the 1860s, by contrast, they became somewhat less common. In both countries capital punishment ceased to be carried out in public in 1868.

Capital punishment was retained in both Irish states after partition. In independent Ireland there were 24 executions between 1924 and 1954, in Northern Ireland thirteen between 1922 and 1961. In the Irish Republic the Criminal Justice Act (1964) abolished capital punishment for ordinary murders, while creating a new offence of capital murder, comprising the murder of a police officer or prison officer and certain specific cases of a political nature. The death penalty was abolished for these offences in 1990, and outlawed by a constitutional referendum in June 2001. In Northern Ireland capital punishment was abolished in 1966, except for the murder of a police officer or other crown servant, and murder as part of a seditious conspiracy. In 1973 the law in Northern Ireland was brought into line with that of the rest of the United Kingdom, where the death penalty had been abolished in 1969.

Paul Brand/ and S. J. Connolly