There are so many miscarriages of justice cases that occur all over the world and Scotland to its shame has many cases where innocents are let down by the system, and for those who get caught up in this web of deciet and corruption we should breathe a sigh of relief that we no longer have the death penalty. The last executions in the United Kingdom were by hanging, and took place in 1964, prior to capital punishment being abolished for murder (in 1965 in Great Britain and in 1973 in Northern Ireland). Although not applied since, the death penalty was abolished in all circumstances in 1998. In 2004 the 13th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights became binding on the United Kingdom, prohibiting the restoration of the death penalty for as long as the UK is a party to the Convention. Crimes eligible for the death penalty included shoplifting and stealing sheep, cattle, and horses, and before abolition of the death penalty for theft in 1832, English law was notorious for prescribing the death penalty for a vast range of offenses as slight as the theft of goods valued at twelve pence. Many of these offences had been introduced to protect the property of the wealthy classes that emerged during the first half of the 18th century. In this particular case, the testimony of a 12 year old boy under pressure from the police was enough to arrest, charge and convict and incarcerate innocent men for 39 years. I thought that this was just a mistake, and that they would get this straightened out and we would be out of here within a day or two, Jackson says, because everybody was reassuring me — my mother, my parents — that this was going to be over, it was just a mistake. But it didnt turn out that way. This is how Bridgeman remembers it: No, I didnt expect to be in jail longer than a couple of days myself, he says. Maybe they have a lineup; maybe they check their records or whatever they do, and wed be dismissed. That didnt happen. The testimony of one young boy was enough to sentence them to death. Jackson says that the prosecutors tried to get them to take a plea deal to save their lives. They refused. You know that was the only thing we had to hold on to was our innocence, Jackson says. And if we gave that up, then the game was over. So we had to hold on to that. Learning To Live With Little Hope Ultimately, their death sentence was lifted when the Supreme Court overturned Ohios capital punishment law in 1978. Instead, they were sentenced to life in prison for a crime they insisted they did not commit. youtube/watch?v=2yV_HLDjMlw
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 13:22:45 +0000