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.

It holds an 84% approval rating from the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes based on 37 reviews, with an average rating of 7. Derek Bentley ( Christopher Eccleston) is an illiterate, epileptic, mentally disabled young adult who falls into a gang led by a 16 year old student, Christopher Craig (Paul Reynolds). This drama reveals the controversial postwar 1950's London murder trial that sent an intellectually challenged young man to the gallows for a murder he did not commit. Her daughter, Maria Bentley-Dingwall, who was born 10 years after Derek Bentley's execution, continued the campaign after her mother's death. We want you to feel at home whilst browsing our virtual shelves and we strive to make your online experience as relaxed and hassle-free as possible.

It was on the evidence of four words - Let him have it - that 19-year-old Derek Bentley was sent to the gallows in 1953. In law school we discussed a criminal case where the defendant faced the death penalty based on his use of the ambiguous phrase, “Let him have it! 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. The campaign was initially led by Bentley's parents until their deaths in the 1970s, after which the drive to clear Bentley's name was led by his sister Iris. He trades a Colt Detective Special, of which he claims to have three, to another student for a Luger.

This does not imply that the book is reserved for you but simply that at the time of the request it was listed as available on our computer. After exhausting his ammunition and being cornered, Craig jumped 30 feet (10 metres) from the roof onto a greenhouse, fracturing his spine and left wrist, and had to remain in hospital.

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. My gut feeling is not guilty, even if only because the greater villain in this case was not going to be hanged. The job of deciding whether (a) Bentley had said the words and (b) if he did, what he meant by them, was down to the jury alone, but they were misled by the trial judge.