The authorities have everything under control!
The Labour MP then recalled that the present Conservative Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe had dealt with this point in 1948, not long after he had returned from being a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials (he was, incidentally, instrumental in guiding the drafting of the European Convention of Human Rights), when he was asked whether there was any possibility that an innocent man might be put to death. Fyfe, who had at that point said:
“There is no practicable possibility. Of course a jury might go wrong, the Court of Appeal might go wrong, as might the House of Lords, the Home Secretary. They might all be stricken mad and go wrong, but that is not a possibility which anyone can consider likely. You are moving in the realms of fantasy when you make that suggestion.” (…)
When the three further bodies were found three years later the investigating detectives let it be known that they were satisfied that there was no connection between these bodies and the 1949 murders in the same house…
(And, fascinatingly, this man says the same thing.)
In 1965 yet another inquiry was ordered by the current Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, this time chaired by the High Court judge Sir Daniel Brabin. Brabin, this time, found it was “more probably than not” that Evans murdered his wife but that he did not murder his daughter. An odd conclusion considering both bodies were found together and murdered in the same manner.
Now Evans is the posterboy for wrongful execution in the UK and beyond. But what if, by some very small possibility, those “experts” are wrong?
What if Ludovic Kennedy was mistaken?
(And if he was mistaken about that conclusion, was he wrong about the Lindbergh kidnapping too…?)
To put it another way:
How many “official inquiries” simply parrot prevailing wisdom and faddish conclusions?
Did the inquiries that led to Evans’ postumous pardon actually admit any new physical evidence, or were they swayed by op-eds?
Anyhow: I miss this show. Voice over by Robert Powell, who was basically the country’s Official Narrator of Everything.
PS: England = dump.
And this is further proof that there should have been an Oscar category for “casting” from the start:
The movie was deeply politically motivated:
