On this day...

....in 1962 began one of the most contentious murder trials of modern times. James Hanratty stood accused of the murder of Michael Gregsten in what became known as the "A6 murder". There are plenty of sites you can go to for details of the almost farcical police investigation which led to his arrest, and he was convicted pretty well solely on the identification evidence of Valerie Storie, who was Gregsten's girlfriend and was also raped and shot by his murderer. This despite the fact that on Storie's own evidence she saw her attacker's face for only a few seconds in poor light, and had already picked out a completely innocent man at another identification parade. The clinching factor seemed to be that Hanratty pronounced "thinking" as "finking" which her attacker also did. It is difficult to see how any jury, doing their job properly, could have convicted on such flimsy evidence, or even how the judge could have let the case go to them, but he did, and they did, and Hanratty was hanged. He protested his innocence right to the end. Recently DNA evidence has suggested that he was in fact the murderer, although decades of potential cross-contamination mean this isn't as definitive a finding as it might seem. But in any event this doesn't alter the fact that on the evidence at the time this was a travesty of justice. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of it was that the furore surrounding Hanratty's execution was almost certainly a factor in the abolition of capital punishment a few years later.