Quote Originally Posted by bornatbirth View Post
do you think they would still hang bentley in todays britain
NO ... not even if Capital Punishment WERE still in existence ... and they shouldn't have done so at the time either!

Bentley (19) was diagnosed with epilepsy following a childhood accident. But ... more than that ... various psychological tests revealed him as being of low intelligence - if not entirely mentally defective - meaning that the words he's alleged to've shouted to his 16-year-old accomplice urging him to "let 'im [the police officer] have it, Chris!" - are open to misinterpretation nearly six decades later. Yet it was on these 5 simple words that the whole trial seemed to hinge. And it was those words that - after only two days - led the jury to convict Bentley.

Now whether he [Bentley] actually uttered the words ... resulting in his co-accused pulling the trigger of the sawn-off shotgun that killed PC Miles is open to conjecture. As is the message he'd been trying to convey to his youthful companion when the latter fired the fatal shot. Could he, for example - in the heat of momentary panic - have been exhorting Christopher Craig to surrender his weapon to the approaching constable? We shall never know for sure! But one thing IS certain ... and that is it was THIS statement that formed the basis for the pair's conviction and Bentley's subsequent execution.

Ten years later, in 1963, Craig was released from prison ... and is alive to this day. He claims that scarcely a day passes that he doesn't deeply regret what happened to his friend.

Sadly, Bentley's sister, Iris - who'd campaigned long and hard for her brother Derek to be given a posthumous pardon - didn't live to see it finally being granted in 1998.

As Keith Angel [rightly] points out; "What use is an apology to someone who's dead?" On the other hand, I would continue to maintain that thanks to the emergence of DNA Profiling ... and the tremendous breakthroughs in its indispensible thoroughness in the detection and solving of all sorts of crime ... the chances of a person being wrongly convicted are relatively slim. Unfortunately for Derek Bentley, it arrived half a century too late to save his neck!