‘Cut the Noose Loose’

The most significant late twentieth-century executions in a British Dependent Territory occurred in 1977 when Erskine Burrows and Larry Tacklyn were hanged in Bermuda for a series of politically motivated murders. While previous studies have argued that British ministers could readily have dispensed with the Creech Jones doctrine and prevented these executions, Chapter 5 makes the case that, for political and constitutional reasons, this was not a straightforward proposition, but nor was abandoning Creech Jones a necessary precondition for commuting the death sentences. It further argues that from a long-term perspective, the Bermuda executions were an anomaly rather than a turning point in British death penalty policy. Colonial capital punishment continued to operate into the 1980s much as it had since British abolition, with the British government working behind the scenes to prevent most executions and tolerating periodic political crises over controversial death sentences for fear that advocating abolition would have still more damaging repercussions.