The 1922 committee drafting the Constitution of the Irish Free State submitted three drafts, of which Draft B explicitly prohibited the death penalty; the Provisional Government's final draft was based on Draft B but deleted this prohibition. British laws prescribing the death penalty thus continued in force. The death penalty was retained because of the outbreak of the 1922–3 Civil War. As well as the existing British laws, the "Special Powers Act" (adopted in the form of a motion rather than an act of parliament) was passed by the Third Dáil on 26 September 1922 authorising the National Army to establish military tribunals and impose death sentences for anti-Treaty activity. The National Army made such regulations on 2 October 1922, revised 8–17 January 1923. In the course of the Civil War there were 81 executions by firing squad under these military tribunals. There were also extrajudicial killings, with varying levels of government complicity. In the first decades of the new state's existence, many petitions asking cabinet ministers to commute death sentences adverted to the fact that many ministers had themselves been under sentence of death by either the British or the Irish Free State during the revolutionary period.