from Alan Richardson
The following appeared in Justice of the Peace and Local Government Reviews "A recent convert to the cause of the abolition of capital punishment, it appears, is the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker. In an address last January to the Society for Individual Freedom, now published in the spring issue of that society's official journal, Freedom First, Lord Parker told his audience that whereas a few years ago he was "unhesitatingly in favour" of retaining the death penalty, he was now being rapidly forced to a different view. In the main, Lord Parker's conversion appears to have arisen from the anomalies of the Homicide Act. "It is not only unsatisfactory," he said, "but it is difficult to administer without a feeling of complete abhorrence," The Lord Chief Justice dismissed the possibility of repenling the Act and returning to the status ante. In the first place one could seldom go back in this world, he suggested...and in the second it would involve the continuance of the difficult question of repriéve, under which certainty, which was the greatest deterrent, was liable to cease to operate, But if life imprisonnent was completely to replace the death penalty as the standard punishment, Lord Parker continued, he would:like to see this sentence mean something more like life imprisonment in the:serious cases. A possible course, he suggested, would be to allow the sentencing Judge to lay down a restrictive period indicating the least number of years that he thought the man deservedeceee"