Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...letter from Best in which he wrote to a Nazi radio official: "It would be well for you to emphasize the importance of my work for Germany in its fight against Bolshevism ... at the price of having myself branded as a traitor and exposed to the penalty of death...
...guilty. Louise Best threw an arm around her brother's shoulder. "Don't worry about me, madame," he said. "You are now the sister of a convict." His sentence could be as low as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, or as high as death...
Unripe Time? Last week the House of Commons abolished the death penalty for murder for a trial period of five years. Halfheartedly, the Labor government opposed the change. Kindly Home Secretary Chuter Ede, who ten years ago was speaking out for abolition of the death sentence, now apologetically opposed it. "The time is not ripe," he said, "for the undertaking of this particular reform." He was thinking of Britain's soaring postwar wave of armed robberies and assaults, and of his shriveled police force, 14,000 men under authorized strength. Murders had increased from...
...most M.P.s thought the death penalty had little influence on the murder rate. Some recalled that objections like Ede's were raised more than a century ago to oppose the reform of Britain's brutal criminal laws. In George III's reign, more than 200 crimes were punishable by death. Among them: felling a tree, picking a pocket, associating with gypsies for a month. In 1810, to a proposal to abolish 'the death penalty for shoplifting of articles worth five shillings or more, Lord Ellenborough had solemnly objected: "I trust your lordships will pause before...
Unheeded Plea. Mrs. Ayrton Gould, a Labor M.P., had her own objections to the death sentence. She said it demoralized prison personnel and made prison jobs repulsive to able people. She recalled the case of Edith Thompson, hanged 25 years ago for helping her lover dispose of her husband. Mrs. Thompson had fainted before her execution. Her limp body was dragged to the gallows. Said Mrs. Gould: "That execution was so horrible that after it, the hangman committed suicide,* one of the wardresses who was present went mad, and the chaplain had a very bad nervous breakdown; and every single...