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1 William Tallack, Does the Capital Penalty Prevent Or Produce Murderers 1 (1876)

handle is hein.death/dcovum0001 and id is 1 raw text is: 2Vo. 25. Does the Capital PenaltyPrevent or Produce Murderers? To the Editor of the London Globe-Sir: The public mind, naturally horrified at the recent Whitechapel mur- der, has (and very rightly) felt a universal desire that just punishment should overtake the perpetrators. But this general indignation should not preclude notice of the sim- ple fact that in this, as in innumerable other instances, the fatal sentence has immediately been followed, within a fortnight, by, not a cessation, but an increase of murders, and in particular by the most horrible series of them at Norwich. Similarly at Liverpool, early in the year, when three men were hanged, a sailor was stabbed the same evening, and at the next Summer Assizes the calendar was pronounced to be the blackest on record, there being six cases of murder, and more than twenty of man- slaughter and similar crimes. Yet a leading journal had hoped that the three executions would have proved a turning point. So they did-a turn for an extraordinary increase of local homicide. Again, last year three execu- tions took place in one day at Gloucester. The next week a boy in the same city, who had taken great interest in