History
When Parliament was considering abolition of the death penalty, there were many MPs who were against the reform, and the deal offered was that former capital offences would always inevitably merit a mandatory life sentence. Accordingly, life imprisonment replaced the death penalty as punishment for murderers, firstly for those whose sentences were commuted and later for those whose crimes were not "aggravated" within the meaning of the Homicide Act 1957. To begin with, it was fairly common for those sentenced to life to be released in around ten to fifteen years. As time passed, it came to be thought that longer sentences should be imposed, especially in cases such as the Moors Murders, the Yorkshire Ripper and Dennis Nilsen. The Home Secretary (and now the Minister for Justice) was empowered to make Whole Life Orders to ensure that particularly dangerous or heinous criminals were never released. Presently mandatory lifers serve an average of 14 years and for other lifers the average has been in decline and now stands at nine years.
Read more about this topic: Life Imprisonment In England And Wales
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)