Bentley's sister Iris mounted a lifelong campaign to quash Bentley's conviction after he was executed at Wandsworth Prison in January 1953. The case always turned on the famous phrase he allegedly uttered shortly before his accomplice shot dead a policeman: "Let him have it." Under English and Welsh law it's irrelevant whether the fatal bullet was fired by Craig or a police officer. If Craig started the shooting then he would be guilty of murder even if PC Miles had been killed accidentally by a stray bullet fired by one of his colleagues. Eventually, on 30 July 1998, the Court of Appeal quashed Bentley's conviction for murder. [1] However, Bentley's sister Iris had died of cancer the year before. [14] Her daughter, Maria Bentley-Dingwall, who was born 10 years after Derek Bentley's execution, continued the campaign after her mother's death. [15]

Watson, Geoffrey (2016). "Let him have it: the short, sad life of Derek Bentley" (PDF). The New South Wales Bar Association . Retrieved 28 September 2020. Also, for the Bentley family, I regret that Iris, Derek's sister, who fought all those years for Derek's pardon, died recently before this appeal was concluded. R.M. Coulthard (2000): "Whose text is it? On the linguistic investigation of authorship", in S. Sarangi and R.M. Coulthard: Discourse and Social Life, London, Longman, pp. 270–287 The Court of Appeal was told that Derek Bentley, the teenager hanged for murdering a policeman 45 years ago, had been convicted on "highly suspect" evidence.

The Derek Bentley case - Key takeaways

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. Secondly, there was controversy over the existence and meaning of Bentley's alleged instruction to Craig, "let him have it, Chris". Craig and Bentley denied that Bentley had said the words while the police officers testified that he had said them. Further, Bentley's counsel argued that even if he had said the words, it could not be proven that Bentley had intended the words to mean the informal meaning of "shoot him, Chris" instead of the literal meaning of "give him the gun, Chris". The jury took just 75 minutes to find both Craig and Bentley guilty of PC Miles' murder. Due to his being below 18 at the time of the offence, Craig was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure. Bentley was sentenced to death. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

At the end of the day, the lawyers decided it was not necessary for me to give evidence at the appeal hearing but I was ready and willing to do so in the interests of justice. It was clear that even if Craig was found guilty of murder, he could not be sentenced to death; being aged-16, he was below the minimum age of 18 for execution. However, Derek Bentley was over 18 years' of age and could be sentenced to death.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.