Derek Bentley
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Derek William Bentley (30 June 1933 – 28 January 1953) was hanged at the age of 19 for a murder committed by a friend, creating a cause célèbre and leading to a 45-year long successful campaign to win him a posthumous pardon.
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[edit] The incident that led to the death sentence
Bentley had a difficult upbringing during which he suffered serious injury from a V1 flying bomb and developed epilepsy. He was of limited intelligence (mental age of 11), easily influenced, and unable to read or write. Together with Christopher Craig, aged 16, he broke into a warehouse in Croydon, Surrey, England on 2 November 1952. Craig had a revolver. The two youths were spotted climbing a drain pipe to the roof and the police were called.
When the police arrived, the two boys hid behind a lift-housing. Detective Constable Frederick Fairfax climbed the drain pipe onto the roof and managed to grab Bentley. Bentley managed to break free and was said by a number of police witnesses to have shouted "Let him have it, Chris". Craig opened fire with his revolver, grazing Fairfax's shoulder; nevertheless Fairfax managed to arrest Bentley, who told him that Craig had a Colt .45 and plenty of ammunition. The weapon was in fact a Colt in .455 Eley calibre, for which Craig had a variety of undersized rounds, some of which he had had to modify to fit the gun. The weapon had also had more than half of its barrel sawn off by Craig, so that it would fit in his pocket.
Following the arrival of more policemen, a group was sent onto the roof. The first to reach the roof was Police Constable Sidney Miles, who was immediately killed by a shot to the head. After exhausting his ammunition, Craig jumped some ten metres from the roof, fracturing his spine and left wrist, at which point he was arrested.
Various medals were awarded to the several participating police offices, including one – posthumously – to PC Sidney Miles.
[edit] Legal proceedings
Even if he was convicted of murder, Craig would not face execution as he was below the age of 18. Bentley on the other hand was over 18, although less mature. The case took place before the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Goddard, at the Old Bailey in London. The doctrine of 'constructive malice' meant that a charge of manslaughter was not an option, as the malicious intent of the armed robbery was transferred to the shooting. Bentley's best defence was that he was effectively under arrest when PC Miles was killed; however, this was only after an attempt to escape, during which a police officer had been wounded.
As the trial progressed the jury had more details to consider. The prosecution was unsure how many shots were fired and by whom, and a ballistics expert cast doubt on whether Craig could have hit Miles if he had shot at him deliberately, as the fatal bullet was not found, Craig had used bullets of different under-sized calibres, and the sawn-off barrel made it inaccurate to a degree of six feet at the range from which he fired. There was also the question of what Bentley had meant by "Let him have it", if indeed he had said it. Though in the gangster movies of the time the expression meant "shoot", it could also be construed as signifying that Bentley wanted Craig to surrender the gun.
The Principal Medical Officer responsible was Dr. Matheson, and he referred Bentley to Dr. Hill, a psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital. The medical report stated that Bentley was illiterate and of low intelligence, almost borderline. However, Dr. Matheson was of the opinion that Bentley was not suffering from epilepsy at the time of the alleged offence, that he was not a feeble-minded person under the Mental Deficiency Acts, and that he was sane and fit to plead and stand trial. English law of the time did not recognise the concept of diminished responsibility due to retarded development, though it existed in Scottish law (it was introduced to England by the Homicide Act 1957). Criminal insanity – where the accused is unable to distinguish right from wrong – was then the only medical defence to murder. Bentley, while suffering severe debilitation, was not insane.
The jury took 75 minutes to decide that both Bentley and Craig were guilty of the murder of PC Miles. Bentley was sentenced to death, while Craig was ordered to be detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure (he was eventually released after serving 10 years' imprisonment).
Appeals highlighting the ambiguities of the ballistic evidence, Bentley's mental age and the fact that he did not fire the fatal shot failed to reverse his conviction, and the death sentence was mandatory. David Maxwell Fyfe, who had helped to draft the European Convention on Human Rights, had become Home Secretary when the Conservatives returned to office in 1951. After reading the Home Office psychiatric reports he refused to request clemency from the young and as yet uncrowned Queen, despite a deputation with a petition claimed to represent the wishes of over 200 of his fellow MPs. On 28 January 1953 Derek Bentley was hanged at Wandsworth Prison, London, by Albert Pierrepoint.
[edit] To Encourage the Others
In his definitive 1971 work on the case, To Encourage the Others, David Yallop rigorously documented Bentley's mental deficiencies, inconsistencies in the police and forensic evidence, and the conduct of the trial, all of which worked against the defendents. More significantly, he proposes the theory that Miles was actually killed by a bullet from a gun other than Craig's sawn-off .455 revolver. Yallop draws this conclusion from an interview with Dr David Haler, the pathologist who carried out the postmortem on Miles, and who estimated the head wound was inflicted by a bullet of between .32 and .38 calibre, with the latter being (in Haler's words) "the very ultimate extreme." He estimated that the bullet had been fired from between six to nine feet away. Craig had been firing from a distance of just under forty feet, and had used a variety of under-sized .41, and .45 calibre rounds in his revolver, but it would have been impossible for him to use one of .38 or smaller calibre. Haler did not offer in his trial evidence any estimate of the size of the bullet that had killed Miles. In addition, despite the fact that Craig readily accepts that the bullet that killed Miles came from his gun, he maintains that all of his shots were fired over the rear garden of a house adjacent to the warehouse, approximately 20 degrees to the right of Miles's location from where Craig had been firing.
The standard Metropolitan police pistol at the time was the .32 Webley automatic, a number of which were issued on the night, although it was claimed that they arrived on the scene after Miles was killed and that the only ammunition not returned was two rounds fired by Fairfax. At least one witness, however, claims to have seen armed officers on the scene before Miles was shot. In his book The Scientific Investigation of Crime, the prosecution's ballistics expert Lewis Nickolls stated that he recovered four bullets from the roof, two of .45, one of .41 and one of .32 calibre. The latter was not entered as an exhibit in the trial, or mentioned in Nickoll's evidence to the court.
When Yallop telephoned Haler the day after the initial interview, he confirmed his estimate of the bullet size. Shortly before the publication of Yallop's book (and its serialisation in The Observer), at the request of the publisher's solicitors Haler was provided with a transcript of the interview, which he again confirmed was accurate. It was only after the subsequent broadcast of BBC Play for Today adaptation of To Encourage the Others (directed by Alan Clarke) that Haler sought to deny that he had given any specific estimate of the size of the bullet that killed Miles beyond being "of large calibre."
[edit] Campaign for a pardon for Bentley
Following the execution there was a long campaign, usually led by Bentley's sister Iris, to secure a posthumous pardon for him. On 29 July 1993 Bentley was granted a royal pardon in respect of the sentence of death passed upon him and carried out.
A Court of Appeal verdict of 17 July 1997, in a case with similarities to the Bentley case, cleared Philip English of murdering Sergeant Bill Forth in March 1993, with the reasons being given by Lord Hutton. English had been handcuffed before his companion Paul Weddle killed Sgt. Forth with a concealed knife. The existing joint enterprise law allowed the conviction of English for murder because they had both been attacking Sgt. Forth with wooden staves, making English an accessory to any murder committed by Weddle as part of that assault. Lord Hutton made the 'fine distinction' that a concealed knife was a far more deadly weapon than a wooden stave, so that proof of English's knowledge of it was necessary for conviction. The appeal may have influenced the allowing of a posthumous referral of the Bentley case.
Eventually, on 30 July 1998, the Court of Appeal set aside Bentley's conviction for murder 45 years earlier. Though Bentley was not accused of attacking any of the police officers being shot at by Craig, for him to be convicted of murder as an accessory in a joint enterprise it was necessary for the prosecution to prove that he knew that Craig had a deadly weapon when they began the break-in. Craig was armed with a large knife as well as the gun.
Lord Goddard may have had the problem when summing up that much of the evidence was not directly relevant to Bentley's defence. Lord Chief Justice Lord Bingham ruled that Lord Goddard had not made it clear to the jury that the prosecution was required to have proved Bentley to have known that Craig was armed. He further ruled that Lord Goddard had failed to raise the question of Bentley's withdrawal from their joint enterprise. This would require the prosecution to prove the absence of any attempt by Bentley to signal to Craig that he wanted Craig to surrender his weapons to the police. Lord Bingham ruled that Bentley's trial had been unfair, in that the judge had misdirected the jury and, in his summing-up, had put unfair pressure on the jury to convict. It is important to note that Bingham did not rule that Bentley was innocent, merely that there had been defects in the trial process. Had Bentley still been alive, the ordinary course would have been a retrial.
Lord Mustill had asked for new laws on homicide when setting out his reasons at the time of Lord Hutton's ruling on English's appeal. However, Lord Bingham's ruling blamed Lord Goddard for a miscarriage of justice without making further alteration to the law on joint enterprise. The English judgment, delivered just over two months after the Labour government took office, remained the most recent precedent in joint enterprise law, though the Bentley verdict attracted far more media attention.
The 1991 movie Let Him Have It, starring Christopher Eccleston as Bentley, relates the story, as does the Elvis Costello song Let Him Dangle.
