Mr Fitzgerald told the court that there was the "gravest doubt" as to whether those words were ever spoken and there was "good reason to doubt the veracity" of the officers involved in the case. There was little evidence to suggest that the death penalty stopped people from committing serious crimes. The 1990 book Let Him Have It, Chris written by M J Trow explores the inconsistencies in the police version of events. Far from being homicidal, Mr Fitzgerald said Derek Bentley had shown "complete co-operation" with the police from the time of his capture.

When his appeal was turned down, Bentley's life was placed in the hands of the Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, who had to decide whether to recommend that the Queen exercise the royal prerogative of mercy to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment. Lord Goddard forwarded the jury's recommendation of mercy, but added that he himself "could find no mitigating circumstances". [8] His later statements to author David Yallop, which convinced Yallop that Goddard had wanted a reprieve, [9] appear to have been incorrectly quoted. The same words were used to convict another man, Appleby, in the shooting of a policeman 10 years earlier.A play Example, starring Harry Miller as Bentley, was devised by the Coventry Belgrade TIE Team for fifth and sixth form students and toured from 1975. The play, with an introduction by Miller, was included in a 1980 book Theatre in Education – Four Secondary School Programmes.

The Crown alleged at Bentley's trial in 1952 that the crucial words were those of an angry young man urging his accomplice, Christopher Craig to shoot. Francis Selwyn (1988). Gangland: the case of Bentley and Craig. Crimes of the century. Taylor & Francis. p.101. ISBN 0-415-00907-3.December 1952, Craig and Bentley were charged with murder and appeared at the Old Bailey in London. It would seem that Bentley made legal history by being the first to be hanged as an accomplice in a crime for which the principal in the first degree could not be executed on the grounds of age. 2 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"), were not consistent with Bentley's use of language (his idiolect), as evidenced in court testimony. [17] These patterns fit better the recorded testimony of the policemen involved. This is one of the earliest uses of forensic linguistics on record.

Firstly, the defence claimed there was ambiguity in the evidence as to how many shots were fired and by whom. A later forensic ballistics expert cast doubt on whether Craig could have hit Miles if he had shot at him deliberately: [4] The fatal bullet was not found. Craig had used bullets of different undersized calibres, and the sawn-off barrel made it inaccurate to a degree of six feet at the range from which he fired.

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He said the trial judge, Lord Chief Justice Goddard, "poured scorn on the defence and the defendant, extolled the virtues of the police officers and left the jury with little choice but to do what he presented to them as their duty, and convict". Derek Bentley entered Norbury Manor Secondary Modern School in 1944, after failing the eleven-plus examination. Just before leaving, in March 1948, he and another boy were arrested for theft. Six months later, Bentley was sentenced to serve three years at Kingswood Approved School near Bristol. Christopher Craig also attended the same Secondary Modern school. In 1993 a limited posthumous pardon was granted, accepting Bentley should not have been hanged, although maintaining his guilt. At the time of the burglary attempt and Miles's death, murder was a capital offence in England and Wales. Minors under 18 were not sentenced to death: consequently, of the two defendants, despite Craig having fired the fatal shot, only Bentley faced the death penalty if convicted. The doctrine of felony murder or "constructive malice" meant that a charge of manslaughter was not an option, as the "malicious intent" of the armed robbery was transferred to the shooting. Bentley's best defence was that he was effectively under arrest when Miles was killed. There were three principal points of contention at trial: Bentley's sister Iris mounted a lifelong campaign to quash Bentley's conviction after he was executed at Wandsworth Prison in January 1953.Christopher Craig, by then aged 62 (born May 1936), issued a statement welcoming the pardon for Bentley, stating that "his innocence has now been proved". He also apologised to the families of both PC Miles and Bentley for his actions, as well as his own family for the press intrusion they had suffered over the years. [16] Bentley had a series of health problems. His parents reported that in a childhood accident he had broken his nose and since then he had three seizure fits, including one in which they said he nearly died of choking. [1] The family also said they were bombed out three times during the Second World War, and in one of these incidents the house in which he lived collapsed around him, but a court did not find any indication that he was physically injured in the incident. However, Bentley was later seen to have epilepsy. [2] :102 Today, after 46 years, the conviction of Derek Bentley has been quashed and his name cleared. While I am grateful and relieved about this, I am saddened The Bentley case became a cause célèbre and led to a 40-year-long campaign to win Bentley a posthumous pardon, which was granted in 1993, and then a further campaign for the quashing of his murder conviction, which occurred in 1998. 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.