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British MPs could vote on whether to bring back the death penalty.

Campaigners plan to use an online petition scheme launched by the Government to press their case.

And any petition which receives more than 100,000 names MUST be considered for debate in Westminster.

They want capital punishment - banned in Britain in 1965 - to be restored for those who kill kids or police officers. It would mean people such as Ian Huntley, who murdered two young girls in Soham, Cambridgeshire in 2002, would be executed.

At the moment, the worst sentence any prisoner can get in Britain is to die in jail - to spend the rest of their life there - which is often handed down for murder. It is a sentence which replaces the death penalty and prisoners including Huntley, the Yorkshire Ripper and Moors Murderer Ian Brady are to die in jail. The UK has the EU's largest prison population and has more prisoners serving life sentences than the rest of the EU combined.

The bid to bring back hanging is being spearheaded by blogger Guido Fawkes and its supporters hope to launch it next week.

Tory MP Philip Davies said: "It's something where once again the public are a long way ahead of the politicians.

"I'd go further and restore it for ALL murderers."


Final hangings ... Allen and Evans

House of Commons leader George Young said the new e-petition system was "a step towards a more accessible and transparent" Parliament.

He said: "The public has many opportunities to make their voices heard. This system could give them a megaphone."

The last two executions in Britain were those of Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Allen, who were hanged at the same time on 13th August 1964 at Liverpool's Walton jail and Strangeways in Manchester for the murder of Jack West.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ne ... names.html

   

This is one of the problem that democracy can bring.

   

I'm not pro-death penalty. There are too many innocent people sentenced to life in jail as it is. At least while they are still alive, their innocence could be proven by re-opening a case when new facts come up. And that STILL happens.

   

Why? The people want it.

   

It doesn't mean it's right.

People demanded to burn 'witches' too.

   

Big difference between believing in a myth propagated by religious institutions, and putting to rest those who legitimately deserve it.

   

How so?

Petitions by large numbers of constituents to their MPs on issues important to them causes you to take umbrage with democracy?

   

People want lots of things. Let's replace democracy with totalitarianism so that we don't have to consider the demands of those pesky voting constituents.

   

The people burning witches also thought they legitimately deserved it. You're stuck in your time as much as they were in theirs. What if people deserving to be killed is also a myth?

You don't care at all that a death penalty will always kills a percentage of people who are innocent?

   

I think you're missing the point. I believe CM's response was concerned more with Proc's comment than with the death penalty. You know, the demands of the people upon their MPs.

Following Proc's logic, the anti-HST campaign should not have happened in BC and that BC residents should have just shut up about it and accept it.

With respect to the death penalty, yes, there is a possibility for the innocent to be swept up, but with the proper safety mechanisms, the chances are very unlikely.

   

But still not 0.

Like I said, it is a petition I would never sign, but I would also never withhold anybody the right to file a petition. Any petition.

   

Agreed. Not zero but likely very very low. Some are willing to take that chance. I would be one of them.

   

Well let him say so if that's the case. But what he wrote says nothing about democracy - only that people now have a legitimate view and people then didn't. Easy to fall into that trap - we're the enlightened ones, people in olden days were ignorant. After some time we'll be the people in the olden days being mocked by our descendants.

I'll agree that democracy is the best system we've got. It sure doesn't save us from making decisions that in retrospect turn out to be dumbass.

   

And who has those safety mechanisms for not convicting the innocent. We don't, the US doesn't, doubt if Britain does either. Just look at the Charles Smith cases - those were all deaths of children and the people we convicted would be dead by now under this law, not out and suing the govt for wrongful imprisonment. So not unlikely at all. Or are you saying that because it's the death penalty we would have better systems in place, but since we don't, we don't (shouldn't?) fuss too much about not convicting the innocent?

   

Gunnair was right about my statement. But if you want my personal opinion, then yea, I do think it's worth the risk. If you enacted the death penalty for child-killers, cop-killers (should be emergency worker killers), serial killers, and serial rapists, you're chances of being wrongfully convicted and executed are less then that of getting struck by lightening.

Should the government not also legislate that everyone stays indoors during electrical storms for our own safety because there is 1 in a million odds someone will be struck and die?

   

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