Derek Bentley Case - Posthumous Pardon

Posthumous Pardon

Following the execution there was a public sense of unease about the decision, resulting in a long campaign, mostly led by Bentley's sister Iris, to secure a posthumous pardon for him. In March 1966 his remains were removed from Wandsworth Prison and reburied in a family grave. In August 1970, Lord Goddard told Yallop that he thought Bentley was going to be reprieved, said he should have been, and attacked Maxwell-Fyfe for allowing the execution to go ahead.

On 29 July 1993, Bentley was granted a royal pardon in respect of the sentence of death passed upon him and carried out. However in English law this did not quash his conviction for murder.

Eventually, on 30 July 1998, the Court of Appeal quashed Bentley's conviction for murder. Craig welcomed the pardon granted to Bentley. However, Bentley's parents and sister had died by this date. Bentley himself would have been 65 years old.

Though Bentley had never been accused of attacking any of the police officers, who were shot at by Craig, for him to be convicted of murder as an accessory in a joint enterprise it was necessary for the prosecution to prove that he knew that Craig had a deadly weapon when they began the break-in. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham of Cornhill, ruled that Lord Goddard had not made it clear to the jury that the prosecution was required to have proved Bentley had known that Craig was armed. He further ruled that Lord Goddard had failed to raise the question of Bentley's withdrawal from their joint enterprise. 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. Lord Bingham ruled that Bentley's trial had been unfair because the judge had misdirected the jury and, in his summing-up, had put unfair pressure on the jury to convict. It is possible that Lord Goddard may have been under pressure while summing up since much of the evidence was not directly relevant to Bentley's defence. Lord Bingham did not rule that Bentley was innocent, merely that there had been defects in the trial process. If Bentley had been alive in July 1998 or convicted of the offence, it would have been possible for him to face a retrial.

Another factor in the posthumous defence was that a "confession" recorded by Bentley, which was claimed by the prosecution to be a "verbatim record of dictated monologue", was shown by forensic linguistics methods to have been largely edited by policemen. Linguist Malcolm Coulthard showed that certain patterns, such as the frequency of the word "then" and the grammatical use of "then" after the grammatical subject ("I then" rather than "then I"), was not consistent with Bentley's use of language (his idiolect), as evidenced in court testimony. These patterns fitted better the recorded testimony of the policemen involved. This is one of the earliest uses of forensic linguistics on record.

In a case with similarities to the Bentley case, a House of Lords judgment of 17 July 1997, cleared Philip English of murdering Sergeant Bill Forth in March 1993, the reasons being given by Lord Hutton. English had been handcuffed before his companion Paul Weddle killed Sgt Forth with a concealed knife. The existing joint enterprise law allowed the conviction of English for murder because they had both been attacking Sgt Forth with wooden staves, making English an accessory to any murder committed by Weddle as part of that assault. Lord Hutton made the 'fine distinction' that a concealed knife was a far more deadly weapon than a wooden stave, so that proof of English's knowledge of it was necessary for conviction. The appeal may have influenced the allowing of a posthumous referral of the Bentley case.

Lord Mustill had asked for new laws on homicide when setting out his reasons at the time of Lord Hutton's ruling on English's appeal. However, Lord Bingham's ruling blamed Lord Goddard for a miscarriage of justice without making further alteration to the law on joint enterprise. The English judgment, delivered just over two months after the Labour government took office, remained the most recent precedent in joint enterprise law, though the Bentley verdict attracted far more media attention.