Treachery Act 1940

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The Treachery Act 1940 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom enacted during World War II to facilitate the prosecution and execution of enemy spies, and suspended after the war and later repealed. The law was passed in the month after Nazi Germany invaded France and Winston Churchill became prime minister (23 May 1940).

The Treachery Act was deemed necessary because treason still had its own special rules of evidence and procedure which made it a difficult offence to prove and prosecute (see Treason Act 1695). The new offence of treachery, a felony, was designed to make securing convictions easier as it could be proved under the same rules of evidence as ordinary offences. It was also needed because there was doubt whether the treason laws were applicable to German saboteurs.

Sixteen people were shot by firing squad or hanged for treachery. The first British subject to be executed under the law was George Johnson Armstrong, who was hanged at HMP Wandsworth on 10 July 1941. Duncan Scott-Ford was also executed for treachery in November 1942. German agent Josef Jakobs, the last person to be executed in the Tower of London, was court-martialled and executed by firing squad under this Act. The last person to be executed under the Treachery Act was the British soldier Theodore Schurch, executed on 4 January 1946, who was the last person to be executed in the United Kingdom for an offence other than murder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treachery_Act_1940 .

George Johnson Armstrong (1902 – 9 July 1941) was the first British citizen to be executed under the Treachery Act 1940. Only four other British subjects were executed under this Act; saboteur Jose Estelle Key (a Gibraltarian), Duncan Scott-Ford, Oswald John Job (born in London to German parents) and Theodore Schurch.

Armstrong was an engineer by occupation. He was tried on 8 May 1941 at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey in London) and convicted for communicating with the German Consul in Boston, Massachusetts, to offer him assistance before the United States entered the Second World War.

His appeal on 23 June 1941, at the Court of Criminal Appeal, was dismissed, and on 10 July 1941 at the age of 39 Armstrong was executed by hanging at HM Prison Wandsworth by Thomas Pierrepoint.

Brit traitor, George Armstrong arrested in USA, later hanged > .

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