Exactly
60 years ago on this date (28 January 1953), Derek Bentley was wrongfully
executed for the homicide of PC Sidney Miles in Croydon, England. I will give
information about him from Wikipedia and some links, before blogging about how
to prevent a wrongful conviction like that in the future.
Derek William Bentley (30 June
1933 – 28 January 1953) was a British teenager hanged for the murder of a
police officer, committed in the course of a burglary attempt. The murder of
the police officer was committed by a friend and accomplice of Bentley's,
Christopher Craig, then aged 16. Bentley was convicted as a party to the
murder, by the English law principle of common criminal purpose "joint
enterprise". This created a cause célèbre and led to a 45-year-long
campaign to win Derek Bentley a posthumous pardon, which was granted partially
in 1993, then completely in 1998. The judge in court sentenced Bentley to death
because of his interpretation of 'Let him have it' and described him as
'mentally aiding the murder of Police Constable Sydney Miles'.
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| Derek Bentley |
Early life
Derek
Bentley attended Norbury Secondary modern school in 1944, after failing the
eleven-plus examination. In March 1948 Bentley and another boy were arrested
for theft. In September 1948, he was sentenced to serve three years at
Kingswood approved school, near Bristol.
Bentley
was released from Kingswood school on 28 July 1950, and was a recluse for the
rest of the year. In March 1951, Bentley was hired by a furniture removal firm
but was forced to leave the job after injuring his back in March 1952. In May
1952, Bentley was hired by the Croydon Corporation as a waste collector but was
demoted to street cleaning for unsatisfactory performance in July 1952. Two
months after that, Bentley was sacked by the Corporation.
Health and mental
development
Derek
Bentley had a series of health and developmental problems. In April 1938, aged
four, he reportedly fell 15 feet (5 metres) from a lorry and hit his head on
the pavement, which reportedly caused him to develop epilepsy. During World War
II, the house in which Bentley lived was bombed and collapsed around him,
leaving Bentley with serious head injuries and concussed.
Kingswood
approved school administered diagnostic tests to Bentley during the time of his
detention there. In December 1948, Bentley's mental age was estimated at 10
years, 4 months; his actual age was 15 years, 6 months. Bentley scored 66 on an
IQ test in December 1948 and 77 in 1952. After his arrest in November 1952,
further IQ tests were administered to Bentley at Brixton Prison. Bentley was
described as "borderline feeble-minded", with a verbal score of 71, a
performance IQ of 87 and a full scale IQ of 77.
As
of December 1948, Bentley had a reading age of 4 years, 6 months. He was still "quite
illiterate" at the time of his arrest in November 1952.
Bentley
was examined twice by EEG: a reading on 16 November 1949 indicated he was an
epileptic and a reading on 9 February 1950 was "abnormal".
In
February 1952, Bentley underwent a medical examination for National Service,
where he was judged "mentally substandard" and unfit for military
service.
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|
Sidney
Miles
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Attempted burglary and
the murder of Sidney Miles
On
2 November 1952, Bentley and a sixteen year old companion, Christopher Craig,
attempted to burgle the warehouse of the Barlow & Parker confectionery
company at 27-29 Tamworth Road, Croydon, England. Craig armed himself with a
Colt New Service .455 Eley calibre revolver, of which Craig had shortened the
barrel so that it could be easily carried in his pocket. Craig also carried a
number of undersized rounds for the revolver, some of which he had modified by
hand to fit the gun. Bentley carried a sheath knife and a spiked
knuckle-duster, both of which Craig had given to Bentley.
At
around 9.15pm, a nine-year-old girl in a house across the road spotted both
Craig and Bentley climbing over the gate and up a drainpipe to the roof of the
warehouse. She alerted her mother who called the police.
When
the police arrived, the two youths hid behind the lift-housing. Craig taunted
the police. One of the police officers, Detective Sergeant Frederick Fairfax,
climbed the drainpipe onto the roof and grabbed hold of Bentley. Bentley broke
free of Fairfax's grasp. What happened then is a matter of controversy: police
witnesses later claimed Bentley shouted the words "Let him have it,
Chris" to Craig. Craig and Bentley denied those words were ever spoken;
Craig maintained this denial when interviewed nearly 40 years later in
September 1991.
Craig
fired his revolver at Fairfax, striking him in the shoulder. Despite his
injury, Fairfax was again able to restrain Bentley. Bentley told Fairfax that
Craig was armed with a revolver and had further ammunition for the gun. Bentley
had not used either of the weapons which he had in his pockets.
A
group of uniformed police officers arrived and 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 and being cornered,
Craig jumped around 30 feet (10 metres) from the roof onto a greenhouse,
fracturing his spine and left wrist.
Various
medals were awarded to the several participating police officers, including one
– posthumously – to Miles and the George Cross to Fairfax, in January 1953.
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Christopher
Craig
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Christopher
Craig
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Trial
Bentley and Craig were charged with murder. They
were tried by jury before the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord
Goddard, at the Old Bailey in London between 9 December and 11 December 1952.
Christmas Humphreys, Senior Treasury Counsel, led for the prosecution.
At the time of the burglary attempt and Miles's
death, murder was a capital offence in England & Wales. Minors under 18
were not sentenced to death: consequently, of the two defendants, only Bentley
faced the death penalty if convicted.
The doctrine of felony murder or '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 Miles was killed.
There were three principal points of contention at
trial:
Firstly, the defence claimed there was ambiguity in
the evidence as to how many shots were fired and by whom. A later forensic
ballistics expert cast doubt on whether Craig could have hit Miles if he had
shot at him deliberately: 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.
Second, there was controversy over the existence
and meaning of Bentley's alleged instruction to Craig, "let him have it,
Chris". Craig and Bentley denied that Bentley had said the words while the
police officers testified that he had said them. Further, Bentley's counsel
argued that even if he had said the words, it could not be proven that Bentley
had intended the words to mean the informal meaning of "shoot him,
Chris" instead of the literal meaning of "give him the gun,
Chris".
Third, there was disagreement over whether Bentley
was fit to stand trial in light of his mental capacity. The Principal Medical
Officer responsible was Dr Matheson and he referred Bentley to Dr. Hill, a
psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital. Hill's report stated that Bentley was
illiterate and of low intelligence, almost borderline retarded. However,
Matheson was of the opinion that whilst agreeing that Bentley was of low
intelligence, he was not suffering from epilepsy at the time of the alleged
offence and he was not a "feeble-minded person" under the Mental Deficiency
Acts. Matheson said that he was sane and fit to plead and stand trial. English
law at 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 Craig
and Bentley were guilty of Miles's murder. Bentley was sentenced to death with
a plea for mercy on 11 December 1952, while Craig was ordered to be detained at
Her Majesty's Pleasure (he was eventually released in May 1963 after serving 10
years' imprisonment and has been a law abiding citizen ever since).
Bentley was originally scheduled to be hanged on 30
December 1952 but this was postponed to allow for an appeal. Bentley's lawyers
filed appeals highlighting the ambiguities of the ballistic evidence, Bentley's
mental age and the fact that he did not fire the fatal shot. Bentley's appeal
was unsuccessful on 13 January 1953.
Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe, after reading
the Home Office psychiatric reports, refused to request clemency from the
Queen, despite a petition signed by over 200 of his fellow MPs.
Parliament was not allowed to debate Bentley's
sentence until it had been carried out. The Home Office also refused Dr. Hill
permission to make his report public.
At 9am on 28 January 1953, Derek Bentley was hanged
for murder at Wandsworth Prison, London by Albert Pierrepoint. When it was
announced the execution had been carried out, there were protests outside the
prison and two people were arrested and later fined for damage to property.
To Encourage the Others
In
his 1971 book To Encourage the Others, David Yallop documented Bentley's mental
deficiencies, inconsistencies in the police and forensic evidence and the
conduct of the trial. He proposed the theory that Miles was actually killed by
a bullet from a gun other than Craig's sawn-off .455 revolver. Yallop drew this
conclusion from an interview in March 1971 with Dr. David Haler, the
pathologist who carried out the autopsy on Miles, who Yallop reports estimated
the head wound was inflicted by a bullet of between .32 and .38 calibre fired
from between six to nine feet away. Craig had been firing from a distance of
just under 40 feet and had used a variety of under-sized .41, and .45 calibre
rounds in his revolver; Yallop asserted it would have been impossible for him
to use a bullet 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 July
1970, during an interview with Yallop, Craig accepted that the bullet that
killed Miles came from his gun, but maintained 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. 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 last was not entered as an exhibit in the trial, nor
mentioned in Nickolls' evidence to the court.
When
Yallop telephoned Haler the day after the initial interview, he reportedly
confirmed his estimate of the bullet size. Shortly before the publication of
Yallop's book, Haler was provided with a transcript of the interview, and
Yallop says Haler again confirmed as accurate. After the subsequent broadcast
of the BBC Play for Today adaptation of To Encourage the Others, directed by
Alan Clarke and starring Charles Bolton, 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".
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Derek Bentley was cleared posthumously- he
had been hanged for the murder of a police officer during a burglary committed
in 1953 (Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2042831/Not-jailed-murder-actually-committed-crime--meet-commission-helps-clear-them.html)
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Posthumous
pardon
Following
the execution there was a public sense of unease about the decision, resulting
in a long campaign, mostly led by Bentley's sister Iris, to secure a posthumous
pardon for him. In March 1966 his remains were removed from Wandsworth Prison
and reburied in a family grave. In August 1970, Lord Goddard told Yallop that
he thought Bentley was going to be reprieved, said he should have been, and
attacked Maxwell-Fyfe for allowing the execution
to
go ahead.
On
29 July 1993, Bentley was granted a royal pardon in respect of the sentence of
death passed upon him and carried out. However in English law this did not
quash his conviction for murder.
Eventually,
on 30 July 1998, the Court of Appeal quashed Bentley's conviction for murder. Craig
welcomed the pardon granted to Bentley. However, Bentley's parents and sister
had died by this date. Bentley himself would have been 65 years old.
Though
Bentley had never been accused of attacking any of the police officers, who
were 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. Lord Chief Justice
Lord Bingham of Cornhill ruled that Lord Goddard had not made it clear to the
jury that the prosecution was required to have proved Bentley had 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 because the judge had
misdirected the jury and, in his summing-up, had put unfair pressure on the
jury to convict. It is possible that Lord Goddard may have been under pressure
while summing up since much of the evidence was not directly relevant to
Bentley's defence. Lord Bingham did not rule that Bentley was innocent, merely
that there had been defects in the trial process. If Bentley had been alive in
July 1998 or convicted of the offence, it would have been possible for him to
face a retrial.
Another
factor in the posthumous defence was that a "confession" recorded by
Bentley, which was claimed by the prosecution to be a "verbatim record of
dictated monologue", was shown by forensic linguistics methods to have been
largely edited by policemen. Linguist Malcolm Coulthard showed that certain
patterns, such as the frequency of the word "then" and the
grammatical use of "then" after the grammatical subject ("I
then" rather than "then I"), was not consistent with Bentley's
use of language (his idiolect), as evidenced in court testimony. These patterns
fitted better the recorded testimony of the policemen involved. This is one of
the earliest uses of forensic linguistics on record.
In
a case with similarities to the Bentley case, a House of Lords judgment of 17
July 1997, cleared Philip English of murdering Sergeant Bill Forth in March
1993, 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.
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.
OTHER
LINKS:
LEARN FROM MISTAKES:
Before
I began, let me make it clear, I do not want anybody – not one soul – to ever
be wrongfully executed, however, I still do not think that the guilty must be
allowed to live. As a former opponent of the death penalty, I would have use
Derek Bentley’s case for worldwide abolition. But ever since I became a
proponent of the death penalty, I agree with my beloved philosopher, Immanuel Kant who once said:
“If the
punishment of an innocent person is a mistake of justice administration,
failure to punish a criminal indicates that the absence of justice, which is a worse
mistake.”
One of the miscarriages of justices
that happened in the early 20th century is because technology was
not as good as it was today. If a CCTV had existed on top of the warehouse, it
could have captured everything and maybe Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig
may not have been punished severely.
As for whether Derek Bentley did
shout those words, “Let him have it!”, I personally wished there was a voice
recording equipment attached to the police or special cameras to trail the suspects,
so they can catch it on sight or by voice.
As technology has improved a lot
today, I believe ballistic evidence could have clear Christopher Craig of
deliberate murder.
Another way to prevent a miscarriage
of justice is to have a video interrogation, in this way, the video can show
the reaction of the suspect and police to prove that they were interrogated
fairly and not being threatened to make a false confession. They should have
gotten a proper psychiatrist to see if Derek Bentley was truly fit to stand for
trial.
However, I still believe in the
Joint Enterprise Law, in the sense that it will save more innocent lives.
Rather than abolish it, they should learn from Derek Bentley’s case to prevent
another mistake from happening. The whole trial should have been videotaped to
review it for any mistakes.
I
do hope the criminal justice system around the world can learn from this
miscarriage of justice to prevent a similar case from happening. While I am sad
that an innocent person was wrongfully executed, it still does not mean that
the justice system must stop executing those who are truly guilty (see those
guilty beyond any doubt).
I encouraged people
not to blame Lord Rayner Goddard too much for Derek Bentley’s execution because he was
a good judge and had kept the United Kingdom a safe place to live in. Although,
I personally did not want Lord Goddard to handle the case alone as it was too
much pressure for him, he should have worked together with a team of judges
like those in the Nuremberg Trials. Unlike the current European Court of Human Rights judges, I still respect Lord Goddard for being tough on crime.
To celebrate 223rd anniversary of the Supreme Court of the United
States, I will blog this coming 2 February 2013 on how teamwork plays a part in
the justice system.
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