Thread by @docrussjackson

A #THREAD on the death penalty.

Given the grotesque ideology of so many in the current UK Govt, I have no doubt that calls for the return of the death penalty will soon be made by senior UK politicians & right-wing media pundits.

In fact, the push has already started...

The last UK executions were by hanging, & took place in 1964; capital punishment for murder was suspended in 1965 & finally abolished in 1969 (1973 in NI). Although unused, the death penalty remained a legally defined punishment for certain offences such as treason until 1998.

In 2004 the 13th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights became binding on the UK; it prohibits the restoration of the death penalty as long as the UK is a party to the convention (regardless of the UK’s status in relation to the European Union).

Extremely concerningly, a recent @YouGov poll found that 47% of Tory & Leave voters voters would support the death penalty for all murders, compared with 18% of Labour & Remain voters, 29% of ABC1s, 37% of C2DEs, & 32% of all British adults.

Of course, a long-stated aim of the current UK Government, the entire right-wing print & broadcast media is to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, thus paving the way for the return of the death penalty & the loss of many human rights enjoyed by UK citizens.

A little historical context: In 1908, the Children Act 1908 banned the execution of juveniles under the age of 16. In 1922 a new offence of infanticide was introduced to replace the charge of murder for mothers killing their children in the first year of life.

In 1930 a parliamentary select committee recommended that capital punishment be suspended for a trial period of five years, but no action was taken. From 1931 pregnant women could no longer be hanged (following the birth of their child).

In 1933 the minimum age for capital punishment was raised to 18. The last known execution by the civilian courts of a person under 18 was that of Charles Dobell, 17, hanged at Maidstone together with his accomplice William Gower, 18, in January 1889.

Harold Wilkins, at 16 years old, was the last juvenile sentenced to the death penalty in the UK, in 1932 for a sexually related murder, but he was reprieved due to age.

In 1938 the issue of the abolition of capital punishment was brought before parliament.

A clause within the Criminal Justice Bill called for an experimental five-year suspension of the death penalty. When war broke out in 1939 the bill was postponed. It was revived after the war and to much surprise & was adopted by a majority in the House of Commons (245 to 222).

However, in the House of Lords the abolition clause was defeated. Popular support for abolition was absent and the government decided that it would be inappropriate for it to assert its supremacy by invoking the Parliament Act 1911 over such an unpopular issue.

Instead, then Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, set up a new Royal Commission (the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949–1953) with instructions to determine "whether the liability to suffer capital punishment should be limited or modified".

The commission's report discussed a number of alternatives to execution by hanging (including the electric chair, gas inhalation, lethal injection, shooting, and the guillotine), but rejected them. It had more difficulty with the principle of capital punishment.

Despite a complete absence of good evidence, popular opinion believed that the death penalty acted as a deterrent to criminals - many still do - but the statistics within the report were predictably & inevitably inconclusive.

While the report recommended abolition from an ethical standpoint, it made no mention of miscarriages of justice. The public had expressed great dissatisfaction with the verdict in the case of Timothy Evans, who was tried & hanged in 1950 for murdering his infant daughter.

It later transpired in 1953 that John Christie had strangled at least six women in the same house; he also confessed to killing Timothy's wife. If the jury in Evans's trial had known this, Evans might have been acquitted.

The case generated much controversy & is acknowledged to be a miscarriage of justice.

There were other cases in the same period where doubts arose over convictions & subsequent hangings, such as Ruth Ellis & the notorious case of Derek Bentley.

Ruth Ellis had become a British nightclub hostess in her early teens & went on to become the last woman to be hanged in the UK following the fatal shooting of her lover, David Blakely - a racing driver engaged to another woman.

On 10 April 1955, Ellis shot Blakely dead outside The Magdala pub in London, & she was immediately arrested by an off-duty policeman. At her trial in June 1955, she was found guilty of murder & was sentenced to death; on 13 July she was hanged on 13th July at at HMP Holloway.

Ruth's case caused widespread controversy, evoking intense press & public interest to the point that it was discussed by the Cabinet. Then-PM Anthony Eden accepted the decision was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, but there are indications that he was troubled by it.

On the day of Ruth's execution, columnist Cassandra of the Daily Mirror attacked her sentence, writing: "The one thing that brings stature and dignity to mankind and raises us above the beasts will have been denied her — pity and the hope of ultimate redemption".

The Pathé newsreel reporting the execution openly questioned whether capital punishment—of anyone—had a place in the 20th century. The novelist Raymond Chandler wrote a scathing letter to the Evening Standard referring to what he described as "the medieval savagery of the law".

The case undoubtedly helped strengthen support for the abolition of the death penalty. Reprieve was by then quite commonplace: between 1926 and 1954, 677 men and 60 women had been sentenced to death in England and Wales, with 375 men and seven women being executed.

In 2012 the daily Mail revisited Ruth's case in an article titled "Callous and blinded by lust, the men who killed Ruth Ellis as surely as the hangman, which gives a predictably sensational but also sympathetic account of her case.

The Mail states that at her trial, Ruth "was portrayed as a brassy, cold-hearted nightclub hostess who’d killed her privately educated lover David Blakely because he wouldn’t marry her. Yet Ruth Ellis’s story was far more complex and tragic than that."

No mention was made by the barristers of the childhood physical & sexual abuse Ruth had suffered at the hands of her father, nor of the appalling violence inflicted on her first by her husband & then by Blakely himself.

Nor was there ever any mention of the fact that the gun she’d used to shoot Blakely with had been supplied by another man, Desmond Cussen, who was deeply jealous of Blakely & had taught Ruth how to use it before driving her to the North London street where she would kill Blakely.

Ruth's former husband, George Ellis, committed suicide on 2 August 1958. In 1969, Ellis's mother, Bertha Neilson, was found unconscious in a gas-filled room in her flat in Hemel Hempstead; she never fully recovered & did not speak coherently again.

Ruth's son Andy, who was aged 10 at the time of the execution, took his life in 1982. The judge at Ruth's trial, Sir Cecil Havers, had sent money every year for Andy's upkeep, & Christmas Humphreys, the prosecution counsel at Ruth's trial, paid for his funeral.

The last case I want to focus on is that of Derek Bentley.

In 1953, aged 19, Derek was convicted of the murder of PC Sidney Miles & sentenced to death. It is the most infamous example of the use of joint enterprise law & another grotesque & deeply tragic miscarriage of justice.

Derek Bentley was hanged for the murder of a policeman during a burglary attempt. Christopher Craig, then aged 16, a friend & accomplice of Bentley, was accused of the murder. Bentley was convicted as a party to the crime, via the principle of common purpose, "joint enterprise".

The outcome of the trial, and Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe's failure to grant clemency to Bentley, was highly controversial.

The jury at the trial found Bentley guilty based on the prosecution's interpretation of the ambiguous phrase "Let him have it".

The case centred on Bentley's alleged & extremely ambiguous exhortation to Craig, who had a gun, to "Let him have it", after the judge, Lord Chief Justice Goddard, had described Bentley as "mentally aiding the murder of Sidney Miles".

Bentley was found guilty despite neither possessing nor firing a gun & giving himself to the police without violence. His co-defendant Christopher Craig, who fired the gun, was too young to be executed and served only 10 years in prison.

The police officer is said to have asked Craig to hand over the gun & the prosecution case rested on the ambiguous words he allegedly spoke – ‘Let him have it, Chris’ – interpreted by the court as an incitement to murder.

There was also disagreement over whether Bentley was fit to stand trial in light of his mental capacity. The Principal Medical Officer was Dr Matheson & he referred Bentley to psychiatrist Dr Hill, who stated Bentley was illiterate, of low intelligence, & borderline 'retarded'.

However, Matheson was of the opinion that whilst agreeing that Bentley was of low intelligence, he did not have epilepsy at the time of the alleged offence & he was not a "feeble-minded person" under the Mental Deficiency Acts & thus was sane & fit to plead & 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. Criminal insanity – where the accused is unable to distinguish right from wrong – was then the only medical defence to murder.

Goddard sentenced Bentley to be hanged, despite a recommendation for mercy by the jury, as Under the Judgment of Death Act 1823, no other sentence was possible.

The Bentley case became a cause célèbre, and led to a 45-year-long campaign to win Derek Bentley a posthumous pardon.

Eventually, a posthumous pardon was granted in 1993, followed by a further campaign for the quashing of his murder conviction, which occurred in 1998.

His case, along with that of timothy Evans, was pivotal in the successful campaign to abolish capital punishment in the UK.

In January 2020, more than seven decades after Derek Bentley was hung for a crime he did not commit, surviving family members & campaigners came together to lay a wreath at his grave.

thejusticegap.com/a-victim-of-br…

The commemoration was organised by the legal charity APPEAL! which launched a campaign video to mark the anniversary featuring Christopher Eccleston reprising his role as Bentley in the 1991 film 'Let Him Have It'.

appeal.org.uk/our-work

A brief ceremony was lead by Bentley’s niece Maria Bentley Dingwall beside his grave in Croydon cemetery.

Others present were Emily Bolton, director of @we_are_APPEAL, families from the campaign group @JENGbA & campaigner Bruce Kent, of @PPMI_Innocence.

Maria is determined to keep the case in public memory, ‘lest we forget the miscarriages of justice that still occur today’.

Abigail Wheatcroft, from APPEAL, said it was a reminder of the widespread impact of miscarriages of justice on families across generations.

Bentley’s case is one of the most infamous uses of ‘Joint Enterprise’. Gloria Morrison of JENGBA said people do not realise how frequently joint enterprise is still being used today, children as young as 13 are being given life sentences for crimes they did not directly commit.

‘It was an honour to play Derek in Let Him Have It back then, & doing this campaign clip for #APPEAL felt like a natural extension of that. The system did not listen to Derek then & it is still not listening to people like him today.’ - Christopher Eccleston.

The anniversary ‘reminds us that wrongful convictions are inevitable, & that when they occur, we do not have unlimited time to set them right.’ - #APPEAL founder, Emily Bolton.

Thankfully, the case is still talked about in schools today: this #THREAD was prompted by my daughter.

‘The prisoners we represent have only one life, & that life has been stolen from them by a criminal justice system that is in denial about its mistakes. The Court of Appeal needs to treat these cases as emergencies, so that there are no more ‘Victims of British Justice’.