§ 64. Mr. Jaggerasked the Home Secretary whether he has considered the circumstances of the case of Mrs. Margaret Louise McAuley, sentenced to death at Manchester Assizes on 2nd March last for the murder of her three-year-old son and reprieved within 24 hours; and, as no mother condemned to death in similar circumstances has actually been executed in England and Wales for over 90 years and therefore the sentence of death in such cases is a formality calculated to bring the law into contempt, whether he is prepared to amend the law to put an end to this practice?
§ Sir S. HoareThat I am in full sympathy with the hon. Member's object is shown by my action in recommending an immediate reprieve. As regards amendment of the law, the law has been amended in respect of a number of these pitiful cases by the Infanticide Acts. The 2345 question whether any further amendment is practicable has been considered by successive Home Secretaries with an anxious desire to find some method of distinguishing these special cases from other capital cases, but examination of the various proposals designed to provide a special method of dealing with these comparatively few cases shows that they would involve such alteration of the general law as would create grave difficulties and disadvantages in dealing with a large number of other cases.