Changing Attitudes to Post-execution Punishment 1752–1834

Abstract

This chapter discusses changing attitudes to post-execution punishment between 1752 and the 1830s. It begins by analysing the ways the judges interpreted the 1752 Act and more importantly how the surgeons chose to develop their penal role. It then focusses on key periods of debate between the passing of the Murder Act and its repeal in 1832, particular attention being given to the later eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century debates about extending the use of post-execution punishments to include non-homicidal offences such as robbery and burglary. The gradual abandonment of post-execution punishment is then analysed. The ending of burning at the stake in the 1790s, the growing doubts about gibbeting and its effective abandonment at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the heated parliamentary debates about ending penal dissection that culminated in its abandonment in 1832. Defended to the last by the judges and by key government figures, who saw it as playing a vital differentiating role within the capital punishment system, penal dissection could only be ended because, by 1832, the whole ‘Bloody Code’ system was being rapidly dismantled.