Albert Pierrepoint

Albert Pierrepoint (30 March 1905 – 10 July 1992) was the best known member of a Yorkshire family who provided three of Britain's Chief Executioners in the first half of the 20th century.

Quotes

• All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment, convince me that in what I have done, I have not prevented a single murder.
  • Executioner: Pierrepoint. Harrap 1974. p. 211.

• I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people.
  • Executioner: Pierrepoint. Harrap 1974. p. 210.

• The trouble with the death penalty has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody, but everybody differed about who should get off.
  • Executioner: Pierrepoint. Harrap 1974. p. 211.

About Pierrepoint

• The reputation of the hangman in the three-piece suit is not what it once was. During and after the war, he was considered a hero, a selfless, sober and self-effacing servant of the crown performing an unpleasant duty with no interest in profit or fame.
  More recent research and evidence — and changing attitudes towards capital punishment — suggest he was something very different: a callous, self-important brute, who claimed to be motivated by sacred impulses (as many killers do), fastidiously recorded his trail of death (ditto), relished his own macabre notoriety (ditto), killed several innocent people and went on hanging people, without remorse, long after he had concluded capital punishment was not a deterrent. He quit not from moral scruple but over money. He was not mentally ill, like many of his victims, just entirely loathsome.
  • Ben Macintyre "Pierrepoint liked killing a little too much" The Times (28 April 2023)