Verdict and aftermath

sell him a stolen ring worth £ 350. According to Hanratty, Aspinall was in the greengrocery business and although he could not quite recall the exact name of the road where he lived in Liverpool, he was sure it was called Carlton, Tarelton or Talbot Road. Upon arriving at Lime Street Station, he said that he had had a wash and deposited his suitcase in the left luggage offi ce with a man whose hand, he remembered, was deformed. Outside the station, he caught a bus and got off in Scotland Road and walked into a sweetshop asking for directions. A helpful woman told him to go back into town because he had come too far. Unable to fi nd the road, he ate a meal and then talked to a man on the steps of a billiard hall and tried to sell him a watch. After giving up his search for Aspinall, he travelled to Rhyl to look for a man named Terry Evans. Evans was a man he had met only once before, but Hanratty thought that he might be able to sell him some stolen jewellery. Based on his description of the boarding house at which he claimed to stay, the defence team were able to fi nd it in Rhyl and the owner, Grace Jones, was called to the stand. However, she could only say that she was sure that Hanratty had stayed at the guesthouse sometime between 19 and 26 August. His stay was not registered in her guest book, perhaps because he said he stayed in a room that was actually a bathroom and regulations would not permit a guest to stay in such a room ( Foot, 1971 ).

Finally, the defence contended that the jury was aware of Hanratty’s previous criminal record and that the crimes committed on 22 and 23 August against Storie and Gregsten were inconsistent with his character, for he did not have any previous convictions or alleged off ences relating to violence or sexual assault ( Moles and Sangha, 2002 ).

Exercise 1:

1. Which pieces of evidence, if any, make a persuasive case for Hanratty’s conviction or acquittal? Or does a story need to be told? 2. Did the prosecution establish that Hanratty had the opportunity , motive and capability/ means to commit the crime? 3. How and why do you think the jury arrived at a guilty verdict?

Verdict and aftermath

On 17 February 1961 the jury began deliberations on the case. At one point, the judge was asked to clarify what is meant by ‘reasonable doubt’, suggesting that some jurors might have had doubts about Hanratty’s guilt. Nevertheless, the jury unanimously found Hanratty guilty of Gregsten’s murder and he

was sentenced to death. His defence team fi led an appeal on the grounds that the jury’s verdict was unreasonable or could not be supported by the evidence; that the judge failed to properly put the defence to the jury; and that the judge misdirected the jury in relation to the evidence and failed to summarise the issues raised by the defence. The appeal was rejected and the Lord Chief Justice Parker observed:

The summing up was clear, it was impartial, it was not only fair but favourable to the prisoner and contained no misdirections of law and no misdirections in fact on any of the important issues in the case. The court is of the opinion that this was a clear case. (Cited in Moles and Sangha, 2002 )

Refl ecting growing opposition to the death penalty, and perhaps some doubts among the public about Hanratty’s guilt, after the conviction and sentence his father handed in a petition to the Home Offi ce with more than 90,000 names of British citizens calling for a reprieve of his death sentence. The Hanratty family received a reply stating that the Home Secretary was ‘unable to fi nd any suffi cient ground to justify him in recommending Her Majesty to interfere with the due course of the law’ ( Foot, 1971 : 294) and, on 4 April 1962, Hanratty was executed by hanging. He was one of the last off enders to be executed in the UK and, in 1965, the death penalty was permanently abolished under the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 ( Moles and Sangha, 2002 ).

Hanratty’s conviction and subsequent execution caused outrage among some sectors of the public and an A6 Murder Committee was established, comprising a group of campaigners and activists. Among them was journalist Paul Foot, politicians, and even John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Their aim was to try and disprove Hanratty’s guilt and get his conviction overturned posthumously ( Foot, 1971 ). In particular, his supporters contended that he did not have a plausible motivation for the crime and that the prosecution had great diffi culty in properly establishing this requisite for his guilt. Indeed, Woffi nden (1997 : 176) observed that the various suggestions put forward by the prosecution (outlined earlier in this chapter) only served to highlight ‘a black hole at the centre of the case’. He added:

For all the individual pieces of evidence, there was no coherent framework. The Crown simply had no viable explanation as to why this man had ambushed those two people, or this extraordinary crime had ever taken place.

Thus, a long- standing tension developed between the prosecution’s evidence and an understanding of what happened on the night of the crime. We argue that this