"CHRISTIE WAS HANGED SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE HANGING OF EVANS, FOLLOWING THE DISCOVERY OF SEVERAL MORE BODIES AT 10 RILLINGTON PLACE, NONE OF WHICH BE ASCRIBED TO EVANS, AND AS A RESULT OF A LONG CAMPAIGN, EVANS WAS POSTHUMOUSLY PARDONED. THE SCANDAL HELPED IN THE ABOLITION OF THE DEATH PENALTY IN THE UK." WIKIPEDIA;
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: While enduring a seasonal retreat recently under the hot Florida sun, I stumbled upon a past issue of the "Economist" and learned that Ludovic Kennedy had died of pneumonia in a nursing home in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on 18, October, 2009. I became an admirer of Ludovic Kennedy after reading "10 Rillington Place," which led to the posthumous pardon of Timothy Evans who had been wrongly convicted and hung for the murder of his baby daughter. (The Evans case has often been cited as one of the factors which led to the abolishment of capital punishment in the UK.) I hope that some day soon all of the investigative work which has been done to show that Cameron Todd Willingham was similarly wrongfully convicted and executed, will lead to his posthumous pardon and to the abolishment of capitol punishment in the U.S.A.
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Wikipedia tells us that: "Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy (3 November 1919 – 18 October 2009) was a British journalist, broadcaster, humanist and author best known for re-examining cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the murder convictions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley, and for his role in the abolition of the death penalty in the United Kingdom...Later he became a television journalist and a newsreader on ITV's Independent Television News. He presented the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama for several years. Kennedy was interested in miscarriages of justice, and he wrote and broadcast on numerous cases...He wrote several books that question convictions in a number of notable cases in British criminal history. One of the first miscarriages of justice he investigated was the conviction and hanging of Timothy Evans in his book Ten Rillington Place. He was found to have murdered his baby daughter but Kennedy contended that Evans was innocent, and that the crimes had been committed by the serial killer John Christie. Christie was hanged several years after the hanging of Evans, following the discovery of several more bodies at 10 Rillington Place, none of which be ascribed to Evans, and as a result of a long campaign, Evans was posthumously pardoned. The scandal helped in the abolition of the death penalty in the UK. Kennedy's book was filmed in 1970: Richard Fleischer's film 10 Rillington Place starred John Hurt as Evans and Richard Attenborough as Christie..In 1985, Kennedy published The Airman And The Carpenter, in which he argued that Bruno Hauptmann did not kidnap and murder Charles Lindbergh's baby, a crime for which he was executed in 1936. The book was made into a 1996 HBO film Crime Of The Century, starring Stephen Rea and Isabella Rossellini. In 2003, he wrote 36 Murders and 2 Immoral Earnings, in which he analysed a number of noted cases, including the Evans case and those of Derek Bentley and the Birmingham Six, a number of which were affected by claims of police failure or downright perjury. In it he concluded that the adversarial system of justice in the UK and the United States "is an invitation to the police to commit perjury, which they frequently do", and said that he preferred the inquisitorial system."
The entire Wikipedia post - featuring many other aspects of Kennedy's important life - can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludovic_Kennedy
Harold Levy...hlevy15@gmail.com;
