Here is the speech held by Lord Kennet in the House of Lords on November 9th, 1961 about the death penalty.
I totally agree with his speech so instead of paraphrasing his words, I pasted the whole speech here so you can read it for yourselves.
\"I want to organize under five simple verbs my own reasons for thinking that the death penalty is a bad thing. If we catch a man who has committed a murder, try him and convict him, we have to do something more with him than punish him, because, although he must be punished, there are several other things that ought to happen to him. I think that the whole theory of what ought to be done to a convicted murderer can be summed up in the five verbs: prevent, reform, research, deter and avenge. Let me take these five things in turn and see how the death penalty now looks as a means of achieving them.
The first is 'prevent'. By this I mean preventing the same man from doing it again, to check him in his career-though, of course, nobody makes a career of being a murderer, except the insane, who are not at issue in the question of the death penalty. I believe that I am right in saying that in the course of a century there is only one doubtful case of a convicted murderer, after his release at the end of a normal life sentence, committing another murder. I think that that means, statistically, that the released murderer is no more likely to murder again than anybody else is. The question of long sentences comes in here. If the sane convicted murderer is not to be hanged, should he be imprisoned, and should the length of his service be determined in a way not the usual one for the actual sentence served? I think this question can be answered only by looking at the statistics of how likely a man is to do it again. In other words, how likely a prison sentence for a given number of years, 15, 20 or 30 years, is to prevent him from doing it again. There is a wealth of statistics available to us on that. I do not think they suggest that the convicted murderer who is not hanged should have his prison sentence dealt with in any way differently from that in which prison sentences are usually dealt with.
To turn to the second verb on my list, 'reform'. That is rather a nineteenth century word, and perhaps we should now say 'rehabilitate', stressing more the helping of a man with his social functions rather than adjusting his internal character; but that is a minor point. It is clear that, whatever we may think about what is able to be achieved in our prison system by treatment in the reformatory and rehabilitatory way - and it is open to criticism for lack of funds and so on-it is obvious that less can be achieved if you hang a man. One man who is utterly unreformable is a corpse; and hanging is out of the question, because you cannot achieve any form of reform or rehabilitation by it.
The next word is 'research'. This is not part of the traditional idea of what to do with a convicted murderer. It is rather a new notion that it may be an appropriate purpose in detaining a criminal and inflicting punishment and other things upon him that research should be conducted into the criminal personality and the causes of crime. At the moment we hang only the sanest criminals. We can get all the research we want into the motives, characters and personality structures of those with diminished responsibility, the insane and those under an age to be hanged. But the one we cannot research into is the man who is sane and who commits capital murder in cold blood on purpose. It might be that if we were to keep this man alive and turn psychiatrists and other qualified persons on to talking to him for twenty years during his prison sentence we should find things that would enable us to take measures which would reduce the murder rate and save the lives of the victims. But in hanging these men we cut ourselves off from this possible source of knowledge of help to the victims of murder.
The fourth word, 'deter', is the crux of the whole thing. Abolitionists, as we all know, have held for many years that evidence from abroad has for long been conclusive that the capital penalty is not a uniquely effective deterrent against murder. Retentionists of the death penalty have been saying for years that we are not like those abroad; we are a different country economically; our national temperament is different; and there is this and that about us which is not so about those in Italy, Norway or certain States of the United States, New Zealand, India, or wherever it may be. Now we have this remarkable pamphlet which in effect closes that gap in the abolitionists' argument. It shows within mortal certitude that we are exactly like those abroad, and that in this country the death penalty is not a uniquely effective deterrent against murder.
The last on the list of my five verbs is 'avenge'. Here the death penalty is uniquely effective. If a man has taken life, the most effective, obvious and satisfying form of vengeance is to take his life. I have no argument against that. I think it is true that if one accepts vengeance as a purpose proper for the State in its handling of convicted criminals, then the death penalty should stay for convicted murderers. For myself - and it is only a personal matter - I utterly reject the idea that vengeance is a proper motive for the State in dealing with convicted criminals; and I hope that, from the date of the publication of this of this pamphlet onwards, those who wish to retain the death penalty will admit that its only merit is precisely that of vengeance.\"
To see a world in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
