Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I again rise in this House to reiterate my opposition to the death penalty not only in Australia but around the world. Some years ago I had a parliamentary brief prepared by the Parliamentary Library by a now former employee, Jennifer Norberry. She prepared a very good brief giving a bit of a history of the abolition of the death penalty in Australia. It is worth reiterating part of that history. Queensland abolished the death penalty in 1920 under the Theodore Labor government. New South Wales abolished the death penalty under the Cahill government in 1955 and the Wran government in 1985—a Labor government. In Tasmania the Eric Reece Labor government abolished the death penalty in 1968. In the Commonwealth and the territories the Whitlam Labor government abolished the death penalty in 1973. In Victoria the Rupert Hamer Liberal government legislated for the abolition of the death penalty in 1975. In South Australia the Dunstan Labor government legislated for the abolition of the death penalty in 1976. In Western Australia the Burke Labor government legislated for the abolition of the death penalty in 1984. In the United Kingdom capital punishment for murder was abolished in 1969. Although never applied, the death penalty remained on the statute book for certain other offences until 1998. The last executions took place in 1964, by hanging.

I think it is worth citing a few cases in the United Kingdom that would have had different results for particular individuals concerned if the death penalty had been in place at the time of their respective convictions. One of the cases was that of the Birmingham Six, which involved the Birmingham pub bombings and where a number of people were sentenced to life imprisonment. Their convictions, however, were declared unsafe and overturned by the Court of Appeal on 14 March 1991. Serious doubts as to the police evidence in relation to those matters were raised. There had obviously been a long campaign agitating for the release of those men, and eventually they were released. In that particular matter, it was evidence of police fabrication and suppression of evidence and the discrediting of confessions and of the 1975 forensic evidence that led to the Crown withdrawing most of its case against the men.

It was not just the Birmingham Six; it was the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven. The Maguire Seven were charged with possessing nitroglycerine allegedly passed to the IRA to make bombs, and they were tried and convicted in 1976 and received substantial sentences. With the Guildford Four, again, it was found after much agitation and many appeals that the police had lied, and the conclusion was that, if they had lied about a particular piece of evidence, the entire evidence was misleading. The four were released in 1989 after having their convictions reversed. The verdicts against the Maguire Seven were repealed in 1991, and the court held that members of the London Metropolitan Police beat some of the seven into confessing to the crimes and withheld information that would have cleared them.

Each of those cases involved serious allegations, but it was because of the atmosphere in which the people were tried that, many years later, the courts and inquiries raised real questions over the way those trials were conducted and the convictions. If they had had the death penalty in those cases, there would have been no appeals; the people would have been sentenced to death. Indeed, one of the judges in one of the original trials was unhappy that the men had not been charged with more serious offences so that he could have administered the death penalty. They are some examples in the systems of justice that we know where miscarriages of justice occurred and the death penalty would have been a disgrace if it had applied. (Time expired)