William Blackstone’s monumental Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765—1769) was barely two decades old when it was carried with the First Fleet to Sydney Cove.1
Habitually taken to new colonial outposts, it assisted legal practitioners and administrators on the intricacies of law in a settlement originally conceived to alleviate the overcrowded penal infrastructure of England.
At the beginning of the fourth book, OfPublic Wrongs (1769), New South Wales’ administrators could read of how all punishments fell into three different â€?species’ according to Blackstone: those that aimed to reform the individual offender; those that sought to deter others; and those that totally prevented any further wrongÂdoing. All punishments, including the death penalty, intersected with these principles to varying degrees. In a statement that echoed EnlightÂenment penal ideals, Blackstone opined that â€?atonement or expiation’ for crime was a divine responsibility; for mere humans â€?preventing future [46] [47]crimes' was the sole end of punishment.[48] Blackstone also makes a quiet plea for governments to show greater leniency when handling criminal wrongs—too often, he thought, the English gallows resembled â€?a wanton effusion of human blood'.[49] It was, however, an opinion that took a while to take hold in Britain's newest colony. Once the gallows arrived on the Australian continent, capital punishment was meted out to wrongÂdoers by colonial authorities in ways familiar to new settlers, albeit for much the same reasons as Blackstone pointed out. This chapter provides an overview of Australia's â€?hanging years' given the colonial period was where the majority of executions took place. It discusses the numbers of those executed, how mercy was applied in individual cases and the reduction of capital crimes on the statute books.