Death penalty ‘not the answer’ to murders and stabbings, says Starmer

Reintroducing the death penalty “is not the answer” to murders, rapes and stabbings, Sir Keir Starmer has said.

The Prime Minister faced a call from independent MP Rupert Lowe to hold a public vote on reintroducing capital punishment, during Prime Minister’s Questions.

“Every week, we hear of a brutal murder, rape or stabbing, far too often perpetrated by someone who should not be in our country to begin with,” Mr Lowe told the Commons.

The Great Yarmouth MP, who was originally elected as a Reform UK MP, asked: “Does the Prime Minister agree that for cases where the guilt is so undeniable, the crime so monstrous, the evil so irredeemable, the reintroduction of the death penalty for both foreign and domestic criminals should be put to the British people in a legally binding referendum?”

Sir Keir replied: “Any attack is to be condemned and it is absolutely right, we’re determined that there is a criminal justice response in relation to an attack however it’s carried out and whoever it’s carried out by.

“But reintroducing the death penalty is not the answer to this.

“It didn’t work when it was in place. It led to the death of those that in fact it turned out were innocent.

“But what we must do is improve – as we are – the criminal justice response in this country.”

The death penalty for murder in the UK was outlawed permanently in 1969, with its total abolition for all crimes in 1998.

The last people executed in Britain were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on August 13 1964.

Several people are known to have been hanged despite their innocence, including van driver Timothy Evans, who was wrongly convicted of murdering his baby daughter Geraldine in November 1949.

He died in 1950, three years before his downstairs neighbour, John Christie, confessed to strangling eight female victims, including Mr Evans’s wife Beryl and her 14-month-old daughter.

Derek Bentley, who was accused of murdering a policeman and executed at Wandsworth Prison in January 1953, had his conviction overturned 45 years later in 1998, on the basis it was “unsafe”.