The heavy hand of "Public Policy" can be seen in many judicial decisions; the deterrent effect of severe sentences such as those handed to the "Great Train Robbers" can easily be justified.

Despite Craig's gun being the only one on the roof at the moment that Miles was shot, he proposed the theory that Miles was actually killed by a bullet from a gun other than Craig's sawn-off . Lord Bingham did not rule that Bentley was innocent, merely that there had been fundamental defects in the trial process.Acquitted Too Late: Bentley received a pardon in 1998, decades after his execution, seven years after the movie was made and one year after his sister Iris' death. If only prosecutors and jurors had paid more attention to evidence of Bentley’s disability, which was gathered in Bristol, he might still be alive today.

Lord Goddard forwarded the jury's recommendation of mercy, but added that he himself "could find no mitigating circumstances". Craig then emptied the gun towards the officers, before jumping ten metres from the warehouse roof and landing on a greenhouse. Bentley was unemployed when, on the night of November 12, 1952, he and Craig tried breaking into a confectionery warehouse in Croydon. Just as Evans was actually a hard-drinking man, short on temper and long on fantasies, who left his wife to go off with her best friend and wasn't above using his fists on her, Bentley was a juvenile delinquent well before Craig came on the scene.

She sometimes seems to miss the relevance of facts - she dwells longer on irrelevant detail than on the more important parts of her life.

We want you to feel at home whilst browsing our virtual shelves and we strive to make your online experience as relaxed and hassle-free as possible. While breaking into a warehouse, Craig shoots and kills a police officer, PC Sidney Miles, resulting in Britain's most controversial court case. I thank the Queen for the posthumous pardon, however in my opinion it makes the most minor difference as Bentley was still hanged. The chapter dwells rather on the reputed sexual deviancy of Lord Goddard, but I believe that the coverage is not unfair. At 9 am on 28 January 1953, Bentley was hanged at Wandsworth Prison, London, by Albert Pierrepoint, with Harry Allen assisting.His main argument is that comics and cinema had little effect on the behaviour of Craig and Bentley. Meanwhile, Bentley is sentenced to death under the English common law principle of joint enterprise, on the basis that his statement to Craig was an instigation to shoot.

Six months later, Bentley was sentenced to serve three years at Kingswood Approved School near Bristol. On 11 December 1952, in a now celebrated case, two young men, Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley, were found guilty of murdering a policeman by shooting him.In any case, one of the other policemen on the roof testified that he had not heard Bentley say the fateful words either. The jury took 75 minutes to decide that both Craig and Bentley were guilty of Miles's murder, with a plea for mercy for Bentley. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Haler did not offer in his trial evidence any estimate of the size of the bullet that had killed Miles. The judge who passed the sentence, Lord Goddard, later said he did so expecting that Bentley would be reprieved.