CROWN V COLONY — Let Him Have It: How Britain Hanged 19-Year-Old Derek Bentley for a Murder He Didn't Commit

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. It's Thursday, July second, and this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is day four of Crown Versus Colony, our Independence Day week, putting the United Kingdom's worst on the stand. All week we've looked at killers, a phantom in the Whitechapel fog, a husband and wife who turned a house into a graveyard, a lonely man who murdered for company. Today I'm gonna do something different because the worst crime in this episode wasn't committed by the man in the dock. Today the killer is the state itself. Today we talk about a nineteen year old who pulled no trigger, who was under arrest when the fatal shot was fired, and whom the British justice system marched up to a gallows anyway and hanged. His name was Derek Bentley. And this, to me is the darkest story of the week, precisely because it wore a robe and called itself the law.

1:05 The night of November the second, nineteen fifty two, Croydon, South London, a nineteen year old named Derrek Bentley and his sixteen year old friend, Christopher Craig climbed over a gate and shimmeied up a drain pipe onto the roof of a confectionery warehouse, planning to break in and rob it. A family across the street saw them and called the police. Let me be clear from the start, this was a burglary. Bentley was there to commit a crime, and he had a knife and a knuckle duster in his pockets. I'm not going to pretend he was an angel out for a stroll. But what happened next is the thing. The rest of his short life hinged on. A detective sergeant named Frederick Fairfax got up onto that roof and grabbed Derek Bentley by the arm. Bentley was caught held effectively under arrest, and it was at that moment the police would later say that Bentley shouted five words across the rooftop to his friend, let him have it. Chris Craig had a revolver. Craig fired, wounding Fairfax in the shoulder, and when more officers came up, the first one onto that roof, Police Constable Sydney Miles, forty two years old, was shot through the head and killed instantly. Christopher Craig fired that shot Christopher Craig killed PC Miles. But Christopher Craig was sixteen and, under British law, too young to hang, So the rope went around the neck of the boy who was already in handcuffs when the trigger was pulled.

2:32 That is the case. Let me show you how it happened. Before we go any further, you need to understand who Derek Bentley actually was, because the system that killed him knew exactly who he was and did it anyway. Bentley was nineteen years old, but that number is misleading. He had an IQ measured at seventy seven. He was in the clinical language of the time, Borderlin f feeble minded. He was illiterate, so illiterate that a prison medical officer said he couldn't even recognize or write down all the letters of the alphabet. His reading age was assessed at around four and a half years four and a half.

3:14 He was an epileptic, with brain scans that came back abnormal. He'd been deemed unfit even for National service, the compulsory military service nearly every young British Man did back then. So picture it a grown teenager with the literacy of a toddler and a documented seizure disorder, a young man who'd been bounced through clinics and institutions his whole life, who everybody with a file in front of them could see, was vulnerable. Nobody was really paying attention to Derek Bentley in any way that ever helped him. And the first time the full weight of the British establishment finally did turn its attention on him, it was to put him to death. That's the bitter joke at the center of this.

3:54 The system noticed him exactly once, and it was to kill him. Five words. Everything turned on that one sentence, Let him have it, Chris. The prosecution told the jury it was an order, an incitement. Bentley, they argued, was telling Craig to shoot, and so under the law Bentley was as guilty of the murder as the boy who fired. The defense argued the exact opposite, that if he said it at all, let him have it, meant hand the gun over, give it up, surrender to the officer. Two readings of five words and a young man's life balance between them. And here's what makes it so much worse. It is far from certain that Derek Bentley ever said those words at all. The only evidence he did came from police officers. Craig denied it, Bentley denied it, and in the decades since, serious investigators have concluded it was very likely never said that. It was a line that got written into the story afterward because somebody needed Bentley to have said something that made him a murderer. Think about that. A man may have been hanged over a sentence he never Both Bentley and Craig were charged with murder under an old doctrine of English law. Because a death happened during their crime, the law treated them as jointly responsible for it, whether or not they personally fired the shot. It's the same family of law, joint enterprise that British courts have been wrestling with and narrowing right up into our own century because of exactly the kind of injustice this case represents. Craig, the one who actually

5:26 shot and killed PC Miles, was sixteen, so the most he could face was detention. Bentley, who shot nobody, was nineteen, old enough for the rope sit with the math of that the killer lived because he was younger. The one who killed no one died because he was older. That is not justice, That is bookkeeping with a human life. Now. I want to stop here and do something this case rarely does because in all the righteous anger about Derek Bentley, one man tends to get forgotten, and he is the actual murder victim. His name was Sidney Miles. He was forty two years old. He was a police officer, a husband, a father, and on the night of November the two, nineteen fifty two, he climbed up onto a dark rooftop to do his job and protect people he'd never met, and Christopher Craig shot him dead for it. He was later honored for his bravery. PC. Sidney Miles deserved to go home that night. He deserved justice. His family's grief was real, and so was the public's outrage that a policeman had been gunned down. And I want to be honest with you, because this is where the case gets genuinely hard. The fury that the establishment felt was understandable.

6:51 A copper was dead. But here's the line I'll draw, and I'll draw it hard. Understandable rage is not the same thing as justice. The right pace answer to the murder of Sidney Miles was to convict the man who shot him, which they did. The wrong answer. The obscene answer was to also take a nineteen year old with the mind of a child who fired nothing and hang him to make the books balance. You do not honor a dead police officer by killing an innocent man next to his name. Two wrongs there. PC Miles deserve better, so did Derek Bentley. A justice system worth the word should have been able to hold both of those truths at once. This one couldn't or wouldn't. The trial was over in three days at the Old Bailey in December nineteen fifty two. It was presided over by the Lord Chief Justice himself, Rayner Goddard, a man history remembers as the Hanging Judge, and by every serious modern assessment, Goddard did not give Derek Bentley a fair trial. He had little patience for the psychiatrists and the evidence of Bentley's mental state. He told the jury, in effect, that Bentley was guilty of mentally aiding the murder. He steered them hard toward conviction. The jury was out for about seventy five minutes. They came back guilty, both of them. But here's the thing that should stop you cold. That same jury, the one that convicted him, attached a recommendation for mercy for Derek Bentley. Twelve ordinary people looked at this and said,

8:23 convict him if the law demands it, but for God's sake, do not hang him. The judge forwarded that mercy recommendation up the chain, and alongside it noted that he himself could find no mitigating circumstances, no mitigation for an illiterate, epileptic nineteen year old with the reading age of a small child, who shot no one. The appeal was heard in January and thrown out, and then it came down to one man. The Home Secretary, David maxwell Fife, had the power to commute the sentence, to change the rope to a prison term with a stroke of his pen. Around two hundred members of Parliament wanted the matter debated, There were petitions, there was an enormous public outcry, and maxwell Fiffe said no, he let it proceed. That wasn't a mistake, that wasn't an oversight. That was a choice.

9:17 A man with the power to stop a hanging chose not to stop it. When we come back the morning they hanged Derek Bentley, the letter he dictated to his mom and dad because he couldn't write it himself, and the forty five year fight by one family to force the British state to finally say the words stay with me. Welcome back to Daily Crime and Justice. At nine o'clock in the morning on the twenty eighth of January nineteen fifty three, Derek Bentley was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in London by the executioner, Albert Pierre Point. He was nineteen years old. Outside the prison gates, a crowd had gathered in protest. People tore down the official notice of execution and burned it. There was a sense even then, even in that moment, that something deeply wrong was being done in the name of the law. Before he died, Derek Bentley dictated a last letter to his parents because of course he couldn't write it himself, and in it, this young man that the courts had treated as a cold and calculating murderer just sounded like a frightened boy who wanted to comfort his mom and dad. That's who they hanged, not the monster. The prosecution painted, a scared, limited, vulnerable young man who never understood the machinery that was grinding him up. But here's where this story refuses. To end.

10:43 And here's why it matters. The Bentley family would not let it go. His parents fought to clear his name until they died. Then his sister Iris Bentley picked it up and carried it for decades, gave her life to it, and died of cancer in ninety ninety seven, just before the finish line. Then her daughter carried it the rest of the way, and the state slowly, grudgingly was forced to answer. In nineteen ninety three, forty years after the hanging, Derek Bentley was granted a royal pardon. But a pardon wasn't enough, because a pardon forgives, and the family didn't want forgiveness. They wanted the truth that the conviction was wrong.

11:24 And finally, in nineteen ninety eight, the Court of Appeal quashed Derek Bentley's murder conviction outright, and the judgment was extraordinary. The then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham turned around and condemned his own predecessor. He ruled that Goddard, the original trial judge, had denied Bentley the fair trial, that is, in his words, the birthright of every British citizen. He found the summing up had been prejudiced that the jury had been pushed to convict. Forty five years after they hanged him, the highest court in the land said, in plain language, we got this wrong, and an innocent man died for it. Even Christopher Craig, the boy who actually fired the gun, who'd served his ten years and lived a quiet life after, finally broke his silence to say he was relieved his friend's name was cleared, and sorry, truly sorry for the pain of that night. So that's day four. Derek Bentley was nineteen years old, he had the reading age of a child. He killed no one, and he was in handcuffs when the man died. The state hanged him anyway over five words he probably never said against the mercy of his own jury, and then took nearly half a century to admit it. Accountability doesn't have a legal department, and sometimes it doesn't even have a deadline. Sometimes it just takes a family forty five years of refusing to be quiet. Say both their names tonight, Police Constable Sidney Miles, who should have gone home to

12:56 his family, and Derek Bentley, who should never have died at all. A few honest notes for the record. Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig were both committing a burglary, and Bentley was carrying weapons. The injustice we describe is his murder, conviction and execution, not the existence of a crime. Bentley did not fire the fatal shot and was restrained by police at the time PC Sidney Miles was killed. Craig fired the gun. The phrase let him have it, Chris was central to the prosecution, but its meaning was disputed at trial, and there is serious, long standing doubt as to whether Bentley said it at all. It was reported chiefly by police witnesses and denied by both defendants. Bentley was convicted under the joint enterprise law of the time.

13:46 That conviction was formally quashed by the Court of Appeal in nineteen ninety eight after a royal pardon in nineteen ninety three. Some remarks attributed to the trial judge are reported and contested. Dates and figures here reflect the his historical record as established by those later proceedings. That's Crown Versus Colony day four and tomorrow we finish on the third of July, the eve of American Independence Day, with the most fitting case we could possibly end on. Not a murderer this time, but a rebel, the most famous man in British history to ever try to destroy the British Government, caught in a cellar under Parliament with thirty six barrels of gunpowder and a slow match. Guy Fawkes the Original Act of Independence Tomorrow on Daily Crime and Justice.

14:34 If this one moved you, and I hope it did, do me a favor and share it. Tell somebody we're doing the UK's worst all week and send them this episode in particular, because everybody should know Derek Bentley's name. Word of mouth is how this show grows, and it costs you nothing. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment down below tonight tell me this. Do you think Britain was right to abolish the death penalty after cases like that? This one? I read everyone wherever else you listen on YouTube or anywhere a rating genuinely helps. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been Daily Crime and Justice. A dead policeman who deserved justice and a boy who deserved to live, and a system that failed both of them.

15:17 In a single morning. We said their names do better