Queensland was the first part of the old British Empire to abolish capital punishment. This happened in 1922, with the simple addition of this one sentence to the Criminal Code: ‘The sentence of punishment by death shall no longer be pronounced or recorded, and the punishment of death shall no longer be inflicted’.
The road to abolition was not so simple, however, and this was the second time that a Queensland Labor government (we also had the world's first Labor government, by the way) had tried to pass the bill. The first attempt was in 1916, and parliamentary debate featured a range of arguments in favour of and against the idea, including what has to be one of the most left-field cases ever made against capital punishment.
Speaking against abolition, the Opposition Queensland Liberal Party contended that the issue was unimportant as there were more pressing concerns at hand, such as World War I. Their main line of argument was that capital punishment was a deterrent to crime, and that the absence of the death penalty would result in the rise of ‘lynch law’. The Old Testament sentiment of ‘an eye for an eye’ was raised on numerous occasions.
The arguments in favour of the bill included the religious (a prisoner would be deprived of the full opportunity for repentance); medical (murderers sometimes had ‘mental disease’); practical (hanging failed to act as a deterrent); judicial (even though mistakes had been made in the past, the sentence was irrevocable); and moral (the punishment does not fit the case nor effect the reformation of the offender). It was left to Dr William Taylor to bring an entirely new perspective to the debate.
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| Dr William Frederick Taylor (John Oxley Library #135461) |
As the official parliamentary records show, Taylor argued from a spiritualist viewpoint, asserting the existence of telepathy and astral planes, and that the death of a criminal only serves to release his consciousness into the astral plane, which would cause more harm than good:
By killing the body you free the mind of the individual, and his consciousness is much more capable of influencing others than it was before. That is the great argument against the death penalty… by killing the body, you liberate the criminal, who will do more mischief than he could possibly do if you keep him in his body, it is a mistake to kill him...
If you kill the body with its five senses, the vehicle for the ego, or consciousness, to manifest through on the physical plane, you do a very stupid action, for the evil-disposed man can from the astral plane influence more easily the minds of dwellers on the physical plane than he could do while in his physical body.
Having introduced an angle that nobody saw coming, Taylor then flipped his argument around, saying that although he preferred imprisonment for murder, even inside a prison cell the prisoner may still be able use telepathic powers to influence others into committing crime:
We all know that such a thing as telepathy exists, and if you can concentrate your thought sufficiently you can transmit that thought to some other individual who will receive that thought and act on it...
If you shut him up in a cell he is powerless to do any evil, unless he has a sufficient mental power to concentrate very strongly, and even then there is not much possibility of his doing any evil.
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| All Glory to Hypnotoad! |
To be fair, Taylor was in many ways a great man, having a brilliant medical career and being an early advocate of such causes as female suffrage. Like many others he turned to Spiritualism during the carnage of World War 1 (in which he lost a son). However, this was probably one of the strangest arguments ever presented on the floor of the Queensland parliament.*
After a short debate the bill was defeated, but the Labor government made a second and successful attempt to pass the abolition bill in 1922. William Taylor entered the astral plane in 1927, and has been influencing the minds of unsuspecting Queenslanders ever since.
* Not including the speeches of Bob Katter.
Very interesting article indeed! Whilst Taylor's opinions were fairly controversial, as a spiritualist they would have been quite understandable - execution & burial of criminals was tailored to ensure the soul could never rest. When it came to the disposal of executed prisoners remains, the usual practice was twofold.
ReplyDeleteBodies of the executed would be buried in unconsecrated ground to ensure the soul could not find salvation outside the realm of God. Secondly, corpses would be laid facing the west differing from consecrated burials that faced east - the belief prevailed that on the Day of Judgement, the bodies of the righteous would sit up to face the rising sun in the east & salvation...when the criminals sat up, they would face the west & hence could never be saved. Thus, the entire burial custom for criminals was perfectly suited to ensuring their spirits were trapped on earth for eternity...which would no doubt have panicked the spiritualists immensely!
Liam
Thanks Liam,
ReplyDeleteI know where you're coming from, but I'm not sure executed prisoners in colonial Queensland were treated any differently to other people in death. They received full religious ministration inside prison (some were baptised in their cell) and most had funeral services in the cemetery, so the intent seems to have been to 'save their souls'. It was felt that repentant murderers would be accepted into Heaven, and this is what the religious ministers worked hard at. There again, I would be happy to hear of any evidence to the contrary, especially regarding direction of burials, as there is nothing in the official records on this.
The question of consecration is an interesting one. As South Brisbane was a 'mixed' cemetery there were no 'mass' consecrations of burial ground as happened at denominationally-segregated cemeteries like Toowong. I understand that graveside services themselves would mean the individual ground was consecrated. Again, I would be happy to learn more about this one, its a bit hazy.
I think Liam may be refering to medival practices and beliefs. Most of this kind of thinking was rejected after the reformation ans so was unlikely to have played a part in British Colonial history. However if ithet exists I'd be happy to be pointed towards sources that refute my assertion.
ReplyDeleteI would tend to agree Wid. Executed prisoners were 'property of the Crown'and so it was the government's responsibility to bury them. There is no record or evidence of the Queensland government adopting burial practices out of the ordinary in these cases.
ReplyDeleteLaws relating to capital punishment and the treatment of prisoners underwent massive change from the 1830s onward, and by the 1880s those laws had taken their modern form and were more-or-less unchanged at the time of the last Australian hanging in 1968. The colonial government was certainly not in the business of legislating to affect the 'afterlife'.
Which is why William Taylor's parliamentary comments were so out of place in 1916.
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