The British Execution: 1500–1964 (Shire Library) by Stephen Banks Read Free Book Online Page B

been strangled, as had Beryl and Geraldine Evans. The irresistible inference was that Christie had killed those two as well as the other six and that Evans’s confession had been obtained under duress. Christie was hanged at Pentonville on 15 July 1953. However, it took two inquiries before it was accepted that Evans had been wrongfully hanged and he was posthumously granted a free pardon in 1966.

    The posthumous royal pardon for Timothy John Evans, after his conviction for murder, signed by Roy Jenkins and Queen Elizabeth II 1966.
    Two further cases subsequently galvanised the abolitionist movement. The first was that of Derek Bentley. Bentley had been engaged in a burglary on the roof of a London warehouse when he had been grabbed by a policeman. Bentley had been accompanied by sixteen-year-old Christopher Craig. According to police, Bentley had shouted ‘Let him have it, Chris!’ whereupon Craig had fired a revolver and wounded the arresting officer. He had subsequently opened fire again and killed another policeman. It was claimed that Bentley had encouraged the shooting and both were convicted of murder. Craig was too young to be sentenced to death and Bentley himself was of limited mental capacity – he had made no attempt to use the knife with which he himself was armed, had denied shouting the words alleged and he had not, of course, fired the fatal shot. Two hundred MPs signed a petition calling for clemency but the Home Secretary refused to consider it and Bentley was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 28 January 1953. Doubts about a confession made by Bentley, about ballistic evidence and about his fitness to stand trial contributed to the quashing of his murder conviction by the Court of Appeal in 1998.
    In legal terms, the case of the nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis, who shot dead her violent former lover, David Blakely, outside a Hampstead pub in April 1955, was rather different. She undoubtedly intended the killing, but her own mental state and degree of culpability were called into question after it was discovered that she had suffered a miscarriage in January of that year following an assault by Blakely. In many eyes Blakely could scarcely be described as an innocent victim and, although by the standards of the time Ellis’s sexual life was rather shocking, she was nevertheless young, pretty and a mother of two, all facts calculated to incite public sympathy. For her own part, Ellis made no attempt to deny guilt, declared her readiness to die and, perhaps crucially, protected her current lover, who had both driven her to the place where Blakely was shot and supplied the gun. Had she not done so, she might well have been reprieved. Nonetheless, more than fifty thousand people signed a petition calling for clemency and thirty-five members of the London County Council pleaded with the House of Commons to intervene. The use of a firearm, and the fact that a passer by was slightly injured by a stray bullet, induced the Home Office to reject these appeals and at Holloway Prison, at 9 a.m. on 13 July 1955, Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Great Britain.
    By 1956, the law was under urgent review. No one was hanged in Britain that year, but opposition in the Lords prevented a further attempt at abolition. As a compromise measure, the 1957 Homicide Act came into force. This retained the death penalty for five categories of murder, including murder of a policeman, murder of a prison officer, murder by shooting or causing explosions, murder while resisting or preventing lawful arrest and murder in the course of theft. The very last people to be executed in Britain under this Act were Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans, hanged on 13 August 1964 at Liverpool and Manchester respectively, for the murder of a laundry van driver during a robbery. The Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965 suspended the death sentence for murder for a period of five years and in 1969 this was made permanent.