Comment: Albert Pierrepoint: a ’haunted hangman’ and the death penalty today

Comment: Albert Pierrepoint: a 'haunted hangman' and the death penalty today. By Dr Lizzie Seal , Senior Lecturer in Sociology/Criminology at the University of Sussex Fifty years ago this Sunday, Britain passed a law which brought an end to the death penalty for murder and consigned the noose to history. One executioner, though, did not simply recede into the shadows. Albert Pierrepoint was not the last British hangman, but he was certainly the most famous. His legacy lives on as a symbol of the terrible responsibility of those charged to do the state's killing and a benchmark for our understanding of the job. The 1965 Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act was a trial measure, with abolition finalised in 1969 . But parliamentary votes on reintroduction continued into the 1990s, and it was only relatively recently that the last remnants of the death penalty were definitively removed from UK law.