Most British citizens of a certain age have been in the situation where a windbag, possibly fuelled by alcohol, holds forth on how capital punishment should be re-introduced for murder. At some point during the conversation it is highly likely that another person will counter with the question: 'Well, what if a mistake was made?' Even more likely is that the windbag will then trumpet the legendary fairness of the justice system and how democracy provides almost infallible checks and balances against such miscarriages of justice.
If you should find yourself caught up in such an argument, then instead of gritting your teeth and raising your eyes to heaven, simply relate the following story. It will put an abrupt end to this line of argument. It tells the sorry tale of two young tearaways, one of whom went to the gallows for the action of the other, and of a miscarriage of justice so notorious that it became sufficient to simply name the two defendants to evoke recognition. The UK hanged an innocent person on the basis of a tenuous legal argument fifty years ago, mainly out of a bloodthirsty desire for revenge and to be seen to be making someone pay for a murder, regardless of whether or not they were accountable. The victim of this miscarriage was a mentally-retarded young man who was guilty only of being stupid, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
It is also the story of the start of the abolition of capital punishment in the UK, and a salutary reminder of the consequences of its possible reinstatement. The case of Bentley and Craig is almost unique in British legal history for one reason: it is impossible to read of this case and still remain neutral on the subject of hanging.
The Backdrop
London in the 1950s was, for its poorer inhabitants, a difficult and stressful place to live in. Rationing was still in force, and rather more direct effects of World War II were still being felt. The Bentley family lived in the East End, and had suffered the same consequences of the Blitz as many other families.
Their son Derek had suffered more than many. At only four years of age he had fallen onto his head from a lorry. At the age of seven he had been buried when a bomb hit the air raid shelter they were using, killing his younger sister, and four years later he was covered in roofing tiles when a V1 missile hit the flat in which the family were staying. These events compounded a developmental problem that eventually resulted in him growing up with a mental age of eleven. He would, had he grown up in these more enlightened times, have been 'statemented' as a 'special needs pupil'. He was epileptic and unable to read or write. This isn't to say that he didn't get sufficient care at home: Derek, despite his shortcomings, was a much-loved child and no more so than by his older sister Iris. The two of them became very close after their younger sister was killed in the Blitz.
One of the consequences of having recently fought a war is that weapons tend to be readily available in its aftermath. For any aspiring young thug, it was easy to come by the tools of the trade: guns in particular were easy to obtain. It is difficult to say whether Bentley aspired to anything in particular, let alone crime: he had been in trouble with the police since he was 14, but his headmaster described him as 'the most irregular boy I have had in my career... meek, indifferent, sheep-like'. Eventually, he was sent to Kingswood Approved School near Bristol for breaking into a store. The educational psychologist at the school said he was 'never violent, he was bullied and easily led'. It was at this school that Bentley met Chris Craig, three years his junior.
The Crime
Bentley's parents disapproved of his friendship with Craig, but on 2 November, 1952, the 19-year-old sneaked out of the family home to meet Craig, who had decided to rob a confectionery warehouse owned by Parker and Barlow in Croydon. Craig gave Derek a knuckleduster and a knife, but kept a sawn-off .45 pistol for his own use. The two of them then climbed up onto the roof. Unfortunately for this pair, a little girl living opposite spotted them, and her mother telephoned the police. A patrol car containing a detective constable and a uniformed constable was nearby and went to intercept them. DC Fairfax arrested Bentley as he and Craig tried to make a run for it. Craig pulled out his gun and tried to shoot his way out of it. He hit DC Fairfax in the shoulder, but Bentley made no attempt to escape, despite Fairfax being unarmed and wounded. He 'came quietly', as the vernacular had it.
By this time, reinforcements had been called and several armed officers went up to assist their colleagues. Craig was still shooting at anyone who moved, and this included one of the reinforcements as he came up the stairs fifteen minutes after the whole affray had started. PC Sidney Miles was struck above his left eyebrow and died instantly. After another 30 minutes, Craig ran out of bullets and threw himself off the roof in desperation, landing on a greenhouse roof 30 feet below and breaking his back. In contrast, Bentley was quiet and shocked after the death of PC Miles.
The Trial
Both boys were put on trial for murder at the Old Bailey1 on Thursday 9 December, 1952, and both pleaded not guilty. Unfortunately for both of them, they had Lord Justice Goddard presiding. This particular judge was a rather unsavoury character2. Moreover, the climate in which Goddard was judging this was one in which he would have felt comfortable acting in an extremely biased fashion. He systematically went about destroying the defence case wherever he could, spent 45 minutes summing up (with one minute of that time spent on the defence case), and apparently said to the jury '..., and unless you find good grounds for not convicting them, it is your duty to do it.' Goddard was out for blood.
The prosecution's case had hinged on a point of law:
Where two persons engage in the commission of a crime with a common design of resisting by violence arrest by an office of justice, they have a common design to do that which will amount to murder if the officer should be killed in consequence of resistance.
- Rex v Appleby, 1940
The defence counsel could have argued that Bentley's 'common purpose' had ended when he had been arrested. Bentley had claimed he was not under arrest simply because he was not being physically restrained, but this could easily have been dismissed as being from the viewpoint of a retarded individual, had the defence been up to the job. Moreover, the bullet that had killed Miles was never found but was probably fired from a .32 calibre gun, not Craig's .45. It was therefore uncertain as to whether Craig had fired the shot that actually killed Miles.
The Fatal Phrase
There was, however, one piece of evidence that seemed designed to destroy any chance of defence against the argument of 'common purpose'. Bentley had apparently shouted the phrase 'Let him have it, Chris!' at Craig just before Miles was killed. The prosecution claimed that this showed incitement to murder. Of course, it could have merely been a plea by Bentley for Craig to hand the gun over to a police officer. It did, however, seem like a rather mannered and melodramatic incitement, if that's what it was: 'shoot the bastards/coppers/pigs...' would have been the sort of phrase that Bentley would have been more likely to have uttered. Bentley and Craig denied that this phrase had ever been spoken. Anyway, Bentley had always referred to Craig as 'Kid', or 'Kiddo', never by his first name.
The Sentence
After the all-too predictable verdict of 'guilty,' Bentley was sentenced to death by hanging, but Craig was sentenced to be detained 'during Her Majesty's Pleasure'3, being too young to hang. Bentley was meanwhile taken to Wandsworth Prison where he awaited his execution. Goddard failed to pass on the jury's recommendation for mercy to the Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, not that the latter would have proved in any way receptive to this. Maxwell-Fyfe, himself an enthusiast for the death penalty, though hopefully for reasons other than those of Goddard, blocked all attempts by his fellow MPs to get the matter discussed in Parliament.
The weeks before his execution must have nevertheless seemed like an eternity to Bentley. In the condemned cell, the lights would have been on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and two warders would have watched him like a hawk for that time to make sure that he didn't cheat the hangman by committing suicide.
Bentley bore his ordeal with good spirits at the outset, possibly because having the mental age of an 11-year-old didn't allow him to fully comprehend his eventual fate. The wheels of justice in those days ground coarsely but exceedingly quickly. Bentley's appeal was heard on 13 January, 1953 and dismissed. He joked and shared fruit and cigarettes with his family and the warders, not knowing that Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's only official executioner, had already been contacted. His family, who came to visit him in the interview room attached to the condemned cell, also did not believe that he was going to hang. Derek referred to his death cell as his 'hotel room with bath', unaware that the only way he was going to check out was feet-first.
Once this had become public knowledge, the atmosphere inside and outside Wandsworth prison rapidly soured. The light-hearted atmosphere in the visiting room had evaporated. Bentley took to repeatedly murmuring 'they can't hang me, can they?' On 27 January, the day before the execution, he walked about the condemned cell, dictating a pathetic letter to a prison guard, asking his family to keep his bicycle frames clean and free of rust, and to keep his mackintosh and tie pressed. At the same time, Albert Pierrepoint would have been making preparations: checking Bentley's weight and height, making the calculation for the length of the neck-breaking drop, and testing the trapdoor mechanism and rope with a sandbag. Pierrepoint spent that evening listening to the radio, which told of Parliament sitting into a late session and of two hundred MPs signing a petition demanding mercy.
The telephone call, ordering a stay of execution, never came. An angry crowd gathered outside the prison gates on the morning of the 28 January. Not long before 9am, Pierrepoint went to meet a pale and nervous prison governor, who then led the way to the condemned cell. One minute before 9am, the governor gave a signal and he, Pierrepoint, entered the cell with an orderly. Bentley rose, offering no resistance as the hangman pinioned his wrists, leading him to the chalk marks on the floor and placing the noose and hood over his head while his assistant bound the boy's feet. Derek's last words, before he plummeted through the trap door, were 'I never killed that copper'.
The Aftermath
The mood of the crowd became extremely angry in the minutes that followed. When the death notice was posted outside the prison they tore it off the board, yelling and jeering. Back at the Bentley home, the family stopped the clock on the mantelpiece at 9am precisely. Iris Bentley gave her engagement ring back to her fiancée, vowing never to marry until her brother's name was cleared. She was to become a driven and skilled campaigner both for her brother and against the death penalty.
In the meantime, the vindictiveness that the British State had shown towards Derek now seemed to be targeted at his family. The Home Office repeatedly refused requests by the family to visit his unmarked grave within the prison walls, and destroyed wreaths that they had left at the prison gates.
Iris kept up relentless pressure in the following years to clear her brother's name and this seemed to be bearing fruit when, at last in 1992 - after three books had been written and a film made about the case - the then-Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke stated that he was going to review the case. Hardly surprisingly (for this was a Conservative government) he found no cause for pardoning Bentley and flatly refused a pardon, despite a report by the Metropolitan Police in 1991 which concluded that there were reasonable doubts about the case. However, a year later, the Appeal Court ruled that he had not exercised all the options open to him. The chief complaints about the way that the case had been handled were:
Justice Goddard's blatantly prejudiced attitude throughout the trial had denied Bentley a fair hearing, as several major causes for concern over evidence (such as the missing bullet, and Bentley being under arrest) were dismissed by him during the trial;
Allegations of perversion of the course of justice against police officers: the 'let him have it' phrase bore a marked similarity to another case where the argument of 'common purpose' had been used to secure a murder conviction (Rex v Appleby), and of Derek's surprisingly literate police statement, supposedly dictated verbatim to an officer.
In 1993 Iris won a small victory when Clarke's successor, Michael Howard, granted a partial reprieve on the basis that Derek should not have been hanged. She also succeeded in getting his remains re-interred in Croydon Cemetery, with the epitaph 'A victim of British Justice'. Sadly, Iris died of cancer in 1997.
In 1998, forty-five years after this miscarriage of justice, the Blair Government sent the case back to the Court of Appeal. In remarkable contrast to Clarke, Lord Bingham found that Bentley had been denied 'that fair trial which is the birthright of every British citizen'. A highly critical 52-page judgement concluded that Goddard had misdirected the jury on the burden of proof and placed undue pressure upon them to convict. Bentley was pardoned at last.
Craig, who was released in 1963 and went on to live an uneventful life as a plumber and farmer, broke his silence with a statement that 'I am truly sorry that my actions on 2 November, 1952 caused so much pain and misery for the family of PC Miles, who died that night doing his duty... a day does not go by when I don't think about Derek.'
Capital punishment was effectively abolished in Britain in 19654, despite several votes in Parliament on its re-introduction (all under Conservative governments). It is perhaps this case that caused Albert Pierrepoint who was, ironically, an abolitionist himself to comment:
I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people... The trouble with the death penalty has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody, but everybody differed about who should get off.
Derek Bentley was unavailable for comment.
If you should find yourself caught up in such an argument, then instead of gritting your teeth and raising your eyes to heaven, simply relate the following story. It will put an abrupt end to this line of argument. It tells the sorry tale of two young tearaways, one of whom went to the gallows for the action of the other, and of a miscarriage of justice so notorious that it became sufficient to simply name the two defendants to evoke recognition. The UK hanged an innocent person on the basis of a tenuous legal argument fifty years ago, mainly out of a bloodthirsty desire for revenge and to be seen to be making someone pay for a murder, regardless of whether or not they were accountable. The victim of this miscarriage was a mentally-retarded young man who was guilty only of being stupid, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
It is also the story of the start of the abolition of capital punishment in the UK, and a salutary reminder of the consequences of its possible reinstatement. The case of Bentley and Craig is almost unique in British legal history for one reason: it is impossible to read of this case and still remain neutral on the subject of hanging.
The Backdrop
London in the 1950s was, for its poorer inhabitants, a difficult and stressful place to live in. Rationing was still in force, and rather more direct effects of World War II were still being felt. The Bentley family lived in the East End, and had suffered the same consequences of the Blitz as many other families.
Their son Derek had suffered more than many. At only four years of age he had fallen onto his head from a lorry. At the age of seven he had been buried when a bomb hit the air raid shelter they were using, killing his younger sister, and four years later he was covered in roofing tiles when a V1 missile hit the flat in which the family were staying. These events compounded a developmental problem that eventually resulted in him growing up with a mental age of eleven. He would, had he grown up in these more enlightened times, have been 'statemented' as a 'special needs pupil'. He was epileptic and unable to read or write. This isn't to say that he didn't get sufficient care at home: Derek, despite his shortcomings, was a much-loved child and no more so than by his older sister Iris. The two of them became very close after their younger sister was killed in the Blitz.
One of the consequences of having recently fought a war is that weapons tend to be readily available in its aftermath. For any aspiring young thug, it was easy to come by the tools of the trade: guns in particular were easy to obtain. It is difficult to say whether Bentley aspired to anything in particular, let alone crime: he had been in trouble with the police since he was 14, but his headmaster described him as 'the most irregular boy I have had in my career... meek, indifferent, sheep-like'. Eventually, he was sent to Kingswood Approved School near Bristol for breaking into a store. The educational psychologist at the school said he was 'never violent, he was bullied and easily led'. It was at this school that Bentley met Chris Craig, three years his junior.
The Crime
Bentley's parents disapproved of his friendship with Craig, but on 2 November, 1952, the 19-year-old sneaked out of the family home to meet Craig, who had decided to rob a confectionery warehouse owned by Parker and Barlow in Croydon. Craig gave Derek a knuckleduster and a knife, but kept a sawn-off .45 pistol for his own use. The two of them then climbed up onto the roof. Unfortunately for this pair, a little girl living opposite spotted them, and her mother telephoned the police. A patrol car containing a detective constable and a uniformed constable was nearby and went to intercept them. DC Fairfax arrested Bentley as he and Craig tried to make a run for it. Craig pulled out his gun and tried to shoot his way out of it. He hit DC Fairfax in the shoulder, but Bentley made no attempt to escape, despite Fairfax being unarmed and wounded. He 'came quietly', as the vernacular had it.
By this time, reinforcements had been called and several armed officers went up to assist their colleagues. Craig was still shooting at anyone who moved, and this included one of the reinforcements as he came up the stairs fifteen minutes after the whole affray had started. PC Sidney Miles was struck above his left eyebrow and died instantly. After another 30 minutes, Craig ran out of bullets and threw himself off the roof in desperation, landing on a greenhouse roof 30 feet below and breaking his back. In contrast, Bentley was quiet and shocked after the death of PC Miles.
The Trial
Both boys were put on trial for murder at the Old Bailey1 on Thursday 9 December, 1952, and both pleaded not guilty. Unfortunately for both of them, they had Lord Justice Goddard presiding. This particular judge was a rather unsavoury character2. Moreover, the climate in which Goddard was judging this was one in which he would have felt comfortable acting in an extremely biased fashion. He systematically went about destroying the defence case wherever he could, spent 45 minutes summing up (with one minute of that time spent on the defence case), and apparently said to the jury '..., and unless you find good grounds for not convicting them, it is your duty to do it.' Goddard was out for blood.
The prosecution's case had hinged on a point of law:
Where two persons engage in the commission of a crime with a common design of resisting by violence arrest by an office of justice, they have a common design to do that which will amount to murder if the officer should be killed in consequence of resistance.
- Rex v Appleby, 1940
The defence counsel could have argued that Bentley's 'common purpose' had ended when he had been arrested. Bentley had claimed he was not under arrest simply because he was not being physically restrained, but this could easily have been dismissed as being from the viewpoint of a retarded individual, had the defence been up to the job. Moreover, the bullet that had killed Miles was never found but was probably fired from a .32 calibre gun, not Craig's .45. It was therefore uncertain as to whether Craig had fired the shot that actually killed Miles.
The Fatal Phrase
There was, however, one piece of evidence that seemed designed to destroy any chance of defence against the argument of 'common purpose'. Bentley had apparently shouted the phrase 'Let him have it, Chris!' at Craig just before Miles was killed. The prosecution claimed that this showed incitement to murder. Of course, it could have merely been a plea by Bentley for Craig to hand the gun over to a police officer. It did, however, seem like a rather mannered and melodramatic incitement, if that's what it was: 'shoot the bastards/coppers/pigs...' would have been the sort of phrase that Bentley would have been more likely to have uttered. Bentley and Craig denied that this phrase had ever been spoken. Anyway, Bentley had always referred to Craig as 'Kid', or 'Kiddo', never by his first name.
The Sentence
After the all-too predictable verdict of 'guilty,' Bentley was sentenced to death by hanging, but Craig was sentenced to be detained 'during Her Majesty's Pleasure'3, being too young to hang. Bentley was meanwhile taken to Wandsworth Prison where he awaited his execution. Goddard failed to pass on the jury's recommendation for mercy to the Home Secretary, David Maxwell-Fyfe, not that the latter would have proved in any way receptive to this. Maxwell-Fyfe, himself an enthusiast for the death penalty, though hopefully for reasons other than those of Goddard, blocked all attempts by his fellow MPs to get the matter discussed in Parliament.
The weeks before his execution must have nevertheless seemed like an eternity to Bentley. In the condemned cell, the lights would have been on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and two warders would have watched him like a hawk for that time to make sure that he didn't cheat the hangman by committing suicide.
Bentley bore his ordeal with good spirits at the outset, possibly because having the mental age of an 11-year-old didn't allow him to fully comprehend his eventual fate. The wheels of justice in those days ground coarsely but exceedingly quickly. Bentley's appeal was heard on 13 January, 1953 and dismissed. He joked and shared fruit and cigarettes with his family and the warders, not knowing that Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's only official executioner, had already been contacted. His family, who came to visit him in the interview room attached to the condemned cell, also did not believe that he was going to hang. Derek referred to his death cell as his 'hotel room with bath', unaware that the only way he was going to check out was feet-first.
Once this had become public knowledge, the atmosphere inside and outside Wandsworth prison rapidly soured. The light-hearted atmosphere in the visiting room had evaporated. Bentley took to repeatedly murmuring 'they can't hang me, can they?' On 27 January, the day before the execution, he walked about the condemned cell, dictating a pathetic letter to a prison guard, asking his family to keep his bicycle frames clean and free of rust, and to keep his mackintosh and tie pressed. At the same time, Albert Pierrepoint would have been making preparations: checking Bentley's weight and height, making the calculation for the length of the neck-breaking drop, and testing the trapdoor mechanism and rope with a sandbag. Pierrepoint spent that evening listening to the radio, which told of Parliament sitting into a late session and of two hundred MPs signing a petition demanding mercy.
The telephone call, ordering a stay of execution, never came. An angry crowd gathered outside the prison gates on the morning of the 28 January. Not long before 9am, Pierrepoint went to meet a pale and nervous prison governor, who then led the way to the condemned cell. One minute before 9am, the governor gave a signal and he, Pierrepoint, entered the cell with an orderly. Bentley rose, offering no resistance as the hangman pinioned his wrists, leading him to the chalk marks on the floor and placing the noose and hood over his head while his assistant bound the boy's feet. Derek's last words, before he plummeted through the trap door, were 'I never killed that copper'.
The Aftermath
The mood of the crowd became extremely angry in the minutes that followed. When the death notice was posted outside the prison they tore it off the board, yelling and jeering. Back at the Bentley home, the family stopped the clock on the mantelpiece at 9am precisely. Iris Bentley gave her engagement ring back to her fiancée, vowing never to marry until her brother's name was cleared. She was to become a driven and skilled campaigner both for her brother and against the death penalty.
In the meantime, the vindictiveness that the British State had shown towards Derek now seemed to be targeted at his family. The Home Office repeatedly refused requests by the family to visit his unmarked grave within the prison walls, and destroyed wreaths that they had left at the prison gates.
Iris kept up relentless pressure in the following years to clear her brother's name and this seemed to be bearing fruit when, at last in 1992 - after three books had been written and a film made about the case - the then-Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke stated that he was going to review the case. Hardly surprisingly (for this was a Conservative government) he found no cause for pardoning Bentley and flatly refused a pardon, despite a report by the Metropolitan Police in 1991 which concluded that there were reasonable doubts about the case. However, a year later, the Appeal Court ruled that he had not exercised all the options open to him. The chief complaints about the way that the case had been handled were:
Justice Goddard's blatantly prejudiced attitude throughout the trial had denied Bentley a fair hearing, as several major causes for concern over evidence (such as the missing bullet, and Bentley being under arrest) were dismissed by him during the trial;
Allegations of perversion of the course of justice against police officers: the 'let him have it' phrase bore a marked similarity to another case where the argument of 'common purpose' had been used to secure a murder conviction (Rex v Appleby), and of Derek's surprisingly literate police statement, supposedly dictated verbatim to an officer.
In 1993 Iris won a small victory when Clarke's successor, Michael Howard, granted a partial reprieve on the basis that Derek should not have been hanged. She also succeeded in getting his remains re-interred in Croydon Cemetery, with the epitaph 'A victim of British Justice'. Sadly, Iris died of cancer in 1997.
In 1998, forty-five years after this miscarriage of justice, the Blair Government sent the case back to the Court of Appeal. In remarkable contrast to Clarke, Lord Bingham found that Bentley had been denied 'that fair trial which is the birthright of every British citizen'. A highly critical 52-page judgement concluded that Goddard had misdirected the jury on the burden of proof and placed undue pressure upon them to convict. Bentley was pardoned at last.
Craig, who was released in 1963 and went on to live an uneventful life as a plumber and farmer, broke his silence with a statement that 'I am truly sorry that my actions on 2 November, 1952 caused so much pain and misery for the family of PC Miles, who died that night doing his duty... a day does not go by when I don't think about Derek.'
Capital punishment was effectively abolished in Britain in 19654, despite several votes in Parliament on its re-introduction (all under Conservative governments). It is perhaps this case that caused Albert Pierrepoint who was, ironically, an abolitionist himself to comment:
I have come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing, and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for revenge which takes the easy way and hands over the responsibility for revenge to other people... The trouble with the death penalty has always been that nobody wanted it for everybody, but everybody differed about who should get off.
Derek Bentley was unavailable for comment.
1 London's central Criminal Court.
2 It was said that after sentencing a defendant to a hanging or flogging, his valet would have to provide him with a clean pair of trousers.
3 One of those funny little archaic legal euphemisms, which in this case means that the Home Secretary gets to decide how long the young person is incarcerated for, a fixed tariff being inappropriate.
4 One of the most trenchant opponents of this development was David Maxwell-Fyfe, predictably.
5 Medak made his name with an earlier British crime biography, The Krays.
2 It was said that after sentencing a defendant to a hanging or flogging, his valet would have to provide him with a clean pair of trousers.
3 One of those funny little archaic legal euphemisms, which in this case means that the Home Secretary gets to decide how long the young person is incarcerated for, a fixed tariff being inappropriate.
4 One of the most trenchant opponents of this development was David Maxwell-Fyfe, predictably.
5 Medak made his name with an earlier British crime biography, The Krays.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A9115229
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