Opponent of Capital Punishment
A fervent opponent of the death penalty, Silverman founded the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. He wrote about several miscarriages of justice in the 1940s and 1950s, such as the hanging of Timothy Evans when it later emerged that serial killer John Christie had murdered Evans's wife and had given perjured evidence at Evans's trial in 1949. Silverman proposed a Private Member's Bill on abolition of the death penalty, which was passed by 200 votes to 98 on a free vote in the House of Commons on 28 June 1956 but was defeated in the House of Lords.
In 1965, he successfully piloted the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Bill through Parliament, abolishing capital punishment for murder in Britain and in the British Armed Forces for a period of five years but with provision for abolition to be made permanent by affirmative resolutions of both Houses of Parliament before the end of that period. The appropriate resolutions were passed in 1969.
Silverman's death in 1968 caused a by-election, which was won by Conservative David Waddington.
Read more about this topic: Sydney Silverman
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“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
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“An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.”
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“The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Like cellulite creams or hair-loss tonics, capital punishment is one of those panaceas that isn’t. Only it costs a whole lot more.”
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“Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it.”
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