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1 Review of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis 170 (1832)

handle is hein.agopinions/egwfr0001 and id is 1 raw text is: ( 170 ) ART. VI.-1. Facts relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis. By Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Esq. London. 1831. Q. Reports from the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions. Communicated by the Commons to the Lords, 1828. 3. Ditto, 1829. HAVING no intention to discuss the abstract question of the justice or fitness of capital punishments, but simply to offer some remarks on the question, «iether the Englisi penal law, as it exists, can with propriety be mitigated, we beg, as a preliminary, to call our readers' attention to a short view of the past and present condition of that code. In dealing with legislative questions, we think it is most important, before we decide whither we would go, to understand exactly where we are, and to view the steps by which we have arrived at our actual position. The committee on the Criminal Law in 1819, over which Sir James Mackintosh so ably presided, made the first important and successful steps in the work of mitigating severity of punishment. In compliance with its recommendations, acts were shortly afterwards passed, repealing a variety of capital punishments, some of which ought never to have been enacted, others of which remained wholly unexecuted, or were inapplicable to the existing times. The provisions for putting to death persons taking away women un- lawfully ;-persons receiving money to procure a return of stolen goods;-bankrupts defrauding their creditors ;-persons pulling lown and destroying turnpike-gates, or flood-gates in rivers;- Egyptians remaining one month within the realm;-notorious thieves in the border counties of Northumberland and Cumber- land ;-persons going in masks or disguises in the Mint ;-persons attempting to destroy Westminster, Fullam, and other bridges;* -persons shoplifting to the value of 5s.-were most properly removed from the statute-book. Sir Robert Peel, in the valuable acts which he completed in 1826, for the consolidation of the law respecting larceny and malicious injuries to property, and for improving the administra- tion of justice, (which we noticed at large on a former occasion,) introduced still further mitigations into the punishments for crime. le repealed the penalty of death attaching on the offence of purloining in a church, and confined that punishment to the offence of church-robbery with violence. He removed the ca- pital punishment from the crime of stealing in booths or stalls * These acts were passed in consequence of the watermen, who were injured by the new bridges on the Thames, endeavouring to damage and deface them. The felony of destroying turnpike-gates was created in consequence of the attacks made upon them on their first introduction. at

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