Death Row?

I HAVE always found it curious that the lyrics for the final verse of The Guns of Brixton (1979) allude to 'Death Row'. Now, although I'm a big fan of The Clash, Paul Simonon - who comes from the same part of the Casbah as I do - was obviously unaware that capital punishment had been abolished some ten years earlier. Despite the fact that he and his associates fought the law and came out on the losing side, not to mention that Joe Strummer's father was a bank robber, Paul's complete unfamiliarity with those same tenets of legality was rather fortuitous in that it may have deterred him from becoming a serial killer. Perhaps, when London was calling to check the finer details of British legislation, nobody bothered to answer the telephone?