Royal pardons for capital punishment had become routine at the time for most common crimes. Under the
Judgment of Death Act 1823, a "death recorded" sentence allowed the judge to meet
common law sentencing precedent, while avoiding being mocked by the sentenced, or the public, who realised an actual death penalty sentence was likely to be overridden. As a death sentence had to be delivered orally in court by the judge before a criminal's execution could take place, a written death recorded sentence did not, in practice, represent the death penalty. The sentence became much less common after the
Criminal Law Consolidation Acts 1861 greatly reduced the number of capital offences. A definition of the term appears in early editions of
Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The number of offences for which death was nominally the sentence, and the sentence of death being recorded, were criticized at the time of usage both for being capriciously cruel and for uncertainty of actual punishment: A misunderstanding of the term led
Naomi Wolf, in her 2019 book
Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, to incorrectly claim that there had been a large number of executions for homosexuality in mid-19th-century England. This claim was based on her misreading proceedings of the
Old Bailey, and the use of "death recorded" in these records. == See also ==