The last execution carried out in the Isle of Man, that of John Kewish, embarrassed Queen Victoria so much that the Manx Criminal Code of 1872, decades in the making, was amended in the same year. The last death sentence, passed on Tony Teare in 1992, was the final example of a mandatory death sentence being passed when all concerned knew that the UK government would never allow it to be carried out. The disjunction between law and reality was so sharp that the Manx legislature abolished the death penalty before Teare was retried, and sentenced to mandatory life imprisonment. Why was Queen Victoria embarrassed? Why did the Isle of Man retain the death penalty for so long after effective abolition in the UK? The answer to both questions lies in the status of the Isle of Man as a Crown dependency, neither independent nor part of the UK.
Professor Peter Edge (Oxford Brookes University) and Former Police Prosecutor Dudley Butt
https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/history/
2022-05-24