Museum plan for unused gallows

STANLEY Prison's gallows - unused since being installed 30 years ago - may end up in a museum.

Plans are under way to convert to other uses the gallows and the ''condemned block'', where 40 men on death row are housed.

Capital punishment, last carried out in 1966 when Wong Kai-kei, 25, was hanged for murder in Victoria Prison, was removed from the statute books by a Legislative Council vote on Wednesday.

The two-storey Stanley block will be converted to cells for serious offenders to help ease overcrowding.

The Correctional Services Department is considering exhibiting the gallows in a museum.

Security Branch is seeking Legal Department advice on which other rules relating to the death penalty have to be changed.

The 40 inmates at Stanley, and the territory's only woman on death row who is kept at Tai Lam Centre, were convicted of murder. They are in solitary confinement.

With the exception of those appealing against conviction, inmates on death row will have their sentences commuted to mandatory life imprisonment.

From 1966 until March this year, 263 prisoners had their death sentence commuted either to life or fixed terms of imprisonment.

The abolition of the death penalty did not make any real difference to the serving prisoners because they knew the Government would commute their sentences, a counsellor at the Christian Prison Pastoral Fellowship said.

Mr Man Chi-on said the prisoners' main worry had been that China might carry out the penalty after 1997 if it remained on the statute books.