As a Victim Support volunteer we had to learn some of the workings of the court process.

It is frustrating to know that, even if the police have no doubt as to the perpetrator of a crime the Crown Prosecution Service will not take a case to court unless they have a very high chance of winning the case. There are a lot of guilty people walking around free for lack of incontravertable evidence to convince a jury of their guilt.

The standard set is 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. All it needs is for one person to perjure themselves or for the police to make a mistake in their investigation of the case or the handling of the evidence for that doubt to appear.

In the Bentley case he was executed on the basis of his call to Craig to "Let them have it", construed by the Prosecution as "shoot him". It could just as well have been Bentley telling Craig to give up his gun. There would have appeared to have been a lot of reasonable doubt there, but that was many years ago and, I think, juries may have taken a harder line than is the case these days. Strange that, in the days of the death penalty, there seems to have been this harder line taken than now, when, it seems, a lot of killers can get out of jail inside a few years.