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territories the constitutional instruments by which the Prerogative was delegated contain a formal requirement for the Governor to hold consultations either with his Ministers or with a special committee bofore he takes his decision, which is
personal and deliberate. If the Governor does not exercise the Prerogative, the Secretary of State does not advise The Queen to intervene, unless there has been an evident miscarriage of justice. This policy, which is based on the theory that the Governor and his advisers are in a much better position to judge than the, Secretary of State. would be, was first enunciated by the Colonial Secretary, Mr Arthur Creech-Jones, in a parliamentary reply on 11 August 1947 (Hansard, Col 232-3, Annex A). Under this policy there have been numerous instances where the capital sentence has been commuted without any prompting from the Secretary of State and some instances where commutation has been effected locally in the light of consultations between the Governor and the Secretary of State. Only in one instances during many years has the Secretary of State advised the Crown to override the Governor's decision not to commute namely in the Tsoi case in Hong Kong in 1973, when Her Majesty's Government's decision was based on considerations of United Kingdom policy quite unrelated to Hong Kong.
3.
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The years in which executions were last carried out in the present DOTS and in those countries in which The Queen is Head of State, are shown at Annex B.
Capital Punishment in the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man 4. The present procedure is that the Home Secretary recommends the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (the power of the Sovereign to show mercy towards a convicted person by mitigating or removing the consequences of a conviction) if he is satisfied, after considering all the circumstances, that it can properly be used in clemency or to correct a miscarriage of justice which cannot be corrected by the normal processes of the law.
The United Kingdom
5.
When the suspension of the death penalty for murder was being considered in Parliament in 1948, the then Home Secretary made a statement saying that he would feel it his duty to recommend commutation of all capital sentences until a decision had been reached. He later amended this, saying that his earlier statement had been considered unconstitutional and that each case would be considered on its merits. In 1956, when Mr Silverman's Death Penalty (Abolition) Bill had been introduced, Major Gwilym Lloyd-George made the following statement, with the agreement of the Cabinet, (Hansard 23 February 1956, Col 581) -
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