The The death penalty or capital punishment has been abolished in Australia for many years now.

Tonight I look back at two cases, Gene Lee and Ronald

Ryan who were the last female and last male to be executed in Australia and the

controversy over their convictions that still remains today.

Hi, I'm your host Cambo, grab a beer and pull up a deck chair. This is True Crime Island, another true crime

podcast. So tonight I jump into the last two death penalty cases for a man and a woman in Australia

and go into a bit of the history of how and why it was abolished. Also we will see about the controversies

surrounding both those cases. It got longer than I thought it would so I'm

breaking it up into two parts. I'll have part it would so I'm breaking it up into two parts. I'll have part two in a few

days time. The first bit about the death penalty I'll take from the Law Council of Australia website.

Since 8 a.m. on the 2nd of February, 1967

and the hanging of Ronald Ryan at Melbourne's Pentridge Prison, no one has been executed by the state in Australia.

And I'll get into Ryan's case in part two.

Since the passage of the Death Penalty Act 1973, the death penalty has not been

applied in respect to offences under the law of the Commonwealth and territories for all federal offenses.

The term of life imprisonment replaced the death penalty as the maximum penalty. the

states and territories legislated against the death penalty

at various different times.

The first to abolish it was Queensland in 1922, while the last

was my home state New South Wales which although they did abolish the death penalty for murder in 1955, they retained

the death penalty for treason and piracy until 1985. In fact, Queensland was the first part of the British Commonwealth to abolish hanging. Now when Queensland introduced an abolition bill in 1915, the main arguments

against capital punishment were, prisoners could not fully repent of their crime if executed.

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