Let Him Have Justice

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. It is doubtful that he ever spoke them - he was under arrest when his partner Chris Craig shot a policeman. Craig was too young to hang so Bentley, an illiterate, educationally subnormal epileptic, became an establishment scapegoat. Iris Bentley, Derek's sister, had protected him since he was a baby. She swore to devote her life to clearing his name and over 40 years later is still campaigning. She tells of the childhood they shared, of the poverty and illness and the effect of war and death in the family. Also, of the Bentley family life which sustained Derek through his last days, and has sustained Iris ever since. And she sets out previously unpublished evidence which refutes police accounts of the fateful night.