"Let Him Have it, Chris"

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It was on the evidence of four words - "Let him have it" - that 19-year-old Derek Bentley was sent to the gallows in 1953. Above all, Denise doesn’t want her son to be remembered as a murdered child, and with this beautifully written book she does just that. More Lestrades followed and then some true crime and somehow it all snowballed so now he has many historical biographies and three other crime series (Maxwell, Marlowe and Grand and Batchelor, the latter two written with his wife, writing as Maryanne Coleman, though her name is Carol, actually! The job of deciding whether (a) Bentley had said the words and (b) if he did, what he meant by them, was down to the jury alone, but they were misled by the trial judge. It was on the evidence of four words - Let him have it - that Derek Bentley was sent to the gallows in 1953.

automatic at the time (presumably the revolvers were chosen because they were easier to procure and were more reliable with blanks).He has recently started collaborating on fiction projects (with someone other than his wife, that is) and finds it a really exciting and pleasurable experience. The campaign was initially led by Bentley's parents until their deaths in the 1970s, after which the drive to clear Bentley's name was led by his sister Iris. We feel bound to say that, in our judgment, the Court of Criminal Appeal failed to grapple with this ground of appeal, which should have succeeded". 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 and he was not a "feeble-minded person" under the Mental Deficiency Acts. The rest of the book covers several other celebrated cases (The Birmingham Six, Timothy Evans and Stephen Ward) and is well worth a read.

Mercifully, attitudes have changed since the 1950s, but still the cry: "bring back hanging" can be heard at times. Lord Goddard forwarded the jury's recommendation of mercy, but added that he himself "could find no mitigating circumstances".In the 2013 novel The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh, the character Peter Wimsey notes that the Bentley case has reduced the support for capital punishment. Three officers told the court they had heard him encourage Craig to shoot by shouting "Let him have it". Mr Trow, we can all draw inferences from things left half said, and you did Bentley no favours there. He also carried a number of undersized rounds for the revolver, some of which he had modified by hand to fit the gun. 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.

If someone deserves (and gets) criticism while they are alive, why should their death render any such criticism invalid? What took him to the gallows by making him a clear accomplice was his shout to Craig: "Let him have it Chris", witnessed by three policemen. The public outcry over his execution made waves in British culture, including the 1975 play Example , the 1990 book Let Him Have It, Chris by Welsh crime author M J Trow, 1991 movie Let Him Have It and several songs including “Let Him Dangle” by Elvis Costello. Craig's revolver was by now empty and he jumped or dived off the roof, suffering a fractured spine, breast bone and left forearm.Simply scroll down to make a one-off donation or for full details of the various payment methods you can use. His later statements to author David Yallop, which convinced Yallop that Goddard had wanted a reprieve, [9] appear to have been incorrectly quoted. Bentley's case is thus considered a case of miscarriage of justice alongside that of Timothy Evans, and pivotal in the successful campaign to abolish capital punishment in the United Kingdom. In March 1951, he was employed by a furniture removal firm but was forced to leave the job after injuring his back in March 1952.