Public Opinion and the Penalty for Murder

Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in July 1952 and practised until 2004. He took silk in 1970. Throughout his career he engaged in the campaign for the abolition of capital punishment and in the abolition of the mandatory life sentence for murder. From 1966-1978 he was a member of the Home Secretary's Advisory Council on the Penal System, and chaired the Council's Report in June 1978 on Sentences of Imprisonment. Beatrix Campbell OBE Beatrix Campbell OBE is an award-winning journalist, author, broadcaster, campaigner and playwright. She is the author of Wigan Pier Revisited, which won 1984's Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize, and The Iron Ladies (1987), which won the Fawcett Society Prize. She regularly writes for the Guardian, and has received several awards for her journalism, including the 300 Group's Campaigning Journalist of the Year Award. She has also served on the National Women's Advisory Committee. His Honour Colin Colston QC Colin Colston was called to the Bar in 1962 and practised on the Midland Circuit for the next 21 years. He was regularly involved in both the prosecution and defence in serious criminal cases. He was appointed a Circuit Judge in 1983 and was Resident Judge at St Albans from 1998-2000. Following his retirement he continued to sit part-time as a Deputy Circuit Judge until 2010. He was a member of the Parole Board from 2004 - 2007. He has been a member of HomRAG from the outset. Since 1992 he has been a lay judge of the Court of Arches. He is Canon Emeritus of St Albans Cathedral. Bryan Gibson Bryan Gibson is a barrister and founding director of legal publishers Waterside Press. He is also the founder of the Garrow Society. His former roles include being adviser to the Magistrates' Association Sentencing of Offenders Committee, chair of the Criminal Law Committee of the Justices' Clerks' Society and co-editor of Justice of the Peace. The author of various works on criminal justice, he has been associated with a number of criminal justice campaigns, notably in relation to sentencing, procedure, human rights and the workings of the courts. Dr Adrian Grounds Adrian Grounds was University Senior Lecturer in Forensic Psychiatry at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge and a consultant forensic psychiatrist in the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. Since retiring in 2010 he has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology. He is one of the Parole Commissioners in Northern Ireland. John Harding CBE John Harding CBE was the former Chief Probation Officer for Inner London, from 1993 to 2001. Before that appointment, he was the Chief Probation Officer for Hampshire. He was a member of the Parole Board from 2000-2006. He was appointed Visiting Professor of Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Hertfordshire from 2001-2008. Latterly, he has worked as a part time EU adviser on the development of alternative sanctions in Russia (2007-2009), Turkey (2010) and Serbia (2011). Dr Barrie Irving Barrie Irving is a Senior Research Fellow at RAND Europe in Cambridge and an Honorary Research Fellow at Cardiff University's Police Science Institute. He is currently working on a number of EU assignments including a performance review of Europol and a corruption prevention study for the European Border Agency, Frontex. His early training at master's degree level at UC Berkeley was focused on public attitude research and the psychology of face-to-face interactions. He continued to specialise in these subjects at the Tavistock Institute in London where he started a psycho-legal studies group bringing social science to bear on criminal justice issues notably on the reliability of eye-witness testimony and false confessions. He carried out the independent research on custodial interrogation for the Royal Commission on Criminal procedure that led to the safeguards for interrogees under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE). He was awarded a PhD by Cambridge University for published work on these topics. When the UK Police Foundation was formed as a charitable body in 1980 he became its first director, a post he held until 2005, establishing it as a viable, independently funded, police research and policy analysis agency - the only one of its kind in the world. He has held several commercial directorships and charitable trusteeships. Josepha Jacobson Josepha Jacobson was called to the Bar in 2005. She is a qualified barrister, specialising in domestic and international law. She has contributed to a number of academic legal works including Arlidge and Parry on Fraud (Sweet and Maxwell, 2007). Together with Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC, she was instrumental in the establishment of the capital punishment resource in the Middle Temple Library. She currently works an Associate Legal Officer in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The views expressed in the HomRAG Report are those of the authors listed here and do not necessarily reflect the views of the ICTY or the United Nations. Professor Terence Morris Terence Morris is Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in the University of London and from 1955-1995 taught at the London School of Economics. He (together with Louis Blom-Cooper) wrote extensively over the last 50 years on homicide and capital punishment, their latest work Fine Lines and Distinctions: Murder, Manslaughter and the Unlawful Taking of Human Life was published in July 2011. His outstanding work was an anthropological study of an English prison, entitled Pentonville published in 1961. He was a lay magistrate in South London for more than 30 years. He has a passion for cycling and motoring and in earlier days enjoyed sailing. He has an aptitude for anything mechanical. He lives and works in the countryside outside Winchester where he and his wife fondly look after four dogs. Mark Parsons Mark Parsons has been the Headteacher of Oliver Goldsmith Primary School on the Peckham/Camberwell border for 13 years. He is currently in his fortieth year in teaching and in his twenty-fourth year of primary headship. All his teaching experience has been in the London boroughs of Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark. He was invited to join HomRAG by Colin Slee as a result of Southwark Cathedral's involvement with the memorial service for Damilola Taylor and subsequent conversations with Colin following Mark and his wife's decision to make the Cathedral their family's regular place of worship. Mark is in touch with a wide range of past and present pupils from the Peckham and Brixton areas. John Podmore John Podmore is a former Governor of HM Prisons Brixton, Belmarsh and Swaleside. He worked in a number of roles in the Prison Service, latterly as the Head of the Anti-corruption Unit. He left the service in March 2011 receiving an award from the High Sheriff of Greater London for outstanding work in criminal justice in London. John is a trustee of the Pilgrim Trust, the Longford Trust, Chair of the Longford Prize Panel and on the steering group of the PEN Readers and Writers. The Very Reverend Colin Slee OBE (1945-2011), Dean of Southwark (1994-2011) Despite his heavy and unremitting workload as Dean of Southwark, Colin Slee agreed to be Chairman of HomRAG from its inception. He was a brilliant, charismatic and inspiring leader. Throughout his life he was passionate in his commitment to righting injustice and to supporting those who are marginalised in society - as evidenced by his eviction from his curate's flat in Norwich for giving accommodation to those sleeping in the streets during a hard winter. He brought that same commitment and energy to HomRAG's discussions and led us from the front. He was a man totally unscared and willing to use his position (and risk his career) to challenge the views of those in authority. He regarded it as unacceptable that judges should be required by law to pass the same mandatory life sentence on what is sometimes described as a 'mercy killer' as on the Yorkshire Ripper. His untimely death was a severe blow to HomRAG and to all who were privileged to have known him. Professor Jonathan Wolff Jonathan Wolff is Professor of Philosophy at University College London, and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. He works on applied political philosophy, and his recent works include Disadvantage (Oxford University Press, 2007); Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Enquiry (Routledge, 2011) and The Human Right to Health (Norton, 2012). He writes a regular column for Education Guardian. Victoria Ellis (Secretary 2010-present) Victoria Ellis read Jurisprudence at Oriel College, Oxford University before taking her Bar Exams in 2009. She was called to the Bar in March 2010 and is a Francis Bacon Scholar of The Honourable Society of Gray's Inn. She joined Bates Wells & Braithwaite London in May 2010 as a paralegal and is also a trained McKenzie Friend with the National Centre for Domestic Violence. She is due to commence pupillage in October 2012.