On 28 January, people gathered at Southwark Cathedral for a brief ceremony in memory of Derek Bentley, who was hanged in Wandsworth prison in 1953, exactly 70 years earlier. Bentley was the 19-year-old who was controversially sentenced to death after his 16-year-old friend, Chris Craig, shot PC Sidney Miles dead during an attempted burglary in Croydon.
The service had been organised by Bentley’s niece, Maria Bentley-Dingwall, and was attended by the musician Arthur Kitchener, who wrote The Ballad of Derek Bentley. Afterwards, over coffee, we recalled the circumstances of his trial and execution, and wondered whether anyone would ever consider reintroducing the death penalty. Surely, those days had long passed?
Far from it. We now learn that Lee Anderson, the newly appointed vice-chair of the Conservative party, would like to see it brought back. In an interview with the Spectator, he was asked whether he would support its return. “Yes,” he said. “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. You know that, don’t you? 100% success rate.”
As to whether there might be an argument over possible miscarriages of justice, he added: “Now, I’d be very careful on that one because you’ll get the certain groups saying: ‘You can never prove it.’ Well, you can prove it if they have videoed it and are on camera – like the Lee Rigby killers. I mean: they should have gone, same week. I don’t want to pay for these people.”
Bentley, whose case has inspired songs, books, plays and a film was an easily led teenager with a mental age of 11, who was classified at the time as “educationally sub-normal”. He had already been arrested when the shot was fired and was alleged in his trial to have said, “Let him have it, Chris.”
Craig, being under the age of 18, was jailed. Public protests failed to halt the execution. After his death, Bentley’s sister, Iris, led a long campaign, along with her daughter, Maria, to clear his name. His conviction was eventually quashed at the court of appeal in 1998, the year after Iris’s death, when the lord chief justice, Lord Bingham, noted that, “It must be a matter of profound and continuing regret that this mistrial occurred and that the defects we have found were not recognised at the time.”
The hanging of Bentley, along with that of Timothy Evans in 1950 and Ruth Ellis in 1955, has long been cited as one of the main factors in the eventual abolition of hanging in Britain. It was also the case that juries were becoming reluctant to convict in cases where judges could pronounce a death sentence. This finally led to the 1965 passing of the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act, which suspended and then permanently outlawed the punishment in 1969. There has been, however, longstanding public support for it, which continues to the present day.
The latest YouGov survey on the subject, published in January, shows that 49% of the country would support the death penalty for terrorist acts and the murder of children, with 38% against. Support for its return, if all murders are included, drops to 30%, with 51% against. Parliament has tended to be more liberal on the issue than the general public, and various attempts by private members to bring it back have all foundered.
After Anderson’s remarks, Rishi Sunak very swiftly made it clear that the government would not be seeking to change the law on the subject. Currently there are 55 countries around the world, including the United States, China, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that still have the death penalty – although twice as many have now abolished it. Any country seeking to join the European Union cannot do so if they retain the death penalty.
In London in 1840, the public execution of a valet, François Courvoisier, who had been convicted of cutting the throat of his employer, Lord William Russell, was watched by about 40,000 people. The writers Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray were in the crowd. Dickens later recorded that, at the hanging, he had seen “no sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious.”
He would doubtless have something very pithy to say about a politician who thought it might be a terrific idea to bring back the death penalty on the incontestable grounds that no one who has been hanged, beheaded, garotted or strapped into the electric chair has ever gone on to commit a crime.
Duncan Campbell is a freelance writer who worked for the Guardian as crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent
