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Introduction
Death was the mandatory sentence for all defendants found guilty of murder in England and Wales until 1957, when capital punishment was limited to select categories of murder before being abolished in 1965. Capitally convicted murderers were hanged unless the Home Office deemed their case worthy of reprieve, recommending that the royal prerogative of mercy be exercised to commute the death sentence to imprisonment. Between 1900 and 1965 the Home Office commuted 41% of all sentences for male defendants that they reviewed. Men of color were less likely to receive mercy than white men: in fifty-three cases eligible for the prerogative, only eighteen men, or 34%, had their sentence commuted.1
This article examines how arguments for the reprieve of people of color sentenced to death were racialized, and analyzes the different ways that the race of the condemned could be leveraged to request or grant mercy. Its arguments and findings are drawn from the first project to explore the significance of race to the twentieth-century death penalty in England and Wales. This project examined fifty-six cases in which fifty-seven people of color, all men, were sentenced to death from 1900 to 1965. There were sixty victims; thirty male and thirty female, and twenty-two cases involved sexual jealousy or intimate partner/family killings. The cases were geographically varied, although the largest concentrations were in ports and cities where substantial numbers of migrants settled: fifteen in London, eight in Merseyside, seven in the West Midlands, and six in South Wales. In the majority of the relevant decades, there were ten or fewer capital cases involving men of color as defendants, apart from the 1950s, when there were nineteen. This can be partly explained by postwar Commonwealth migrations to Britain when people of color arrived in greater numbers than previously.2 It also reflects a higher rate of conviction overall: during periods when the future of capital punishment was debated in Parliament, more people were sentenced to death and the prerogative of mercy was more widely applied. Although changing policies complicate the statistical picture, Home Office data for 1900–1949 revealed that of 1,011 men sentenced to death “where the question arose whether the Prerogative should be exercised” 390, or 39%, were reprieved. In thirty-three of the...