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English law is a bit ‘sniffy’ I feel sometimes.
Take Dr. Hawley Crippen for example. One of his distant relatives recently applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to have the case referred to the Court of Appeal on the grounds that he had not, in fact, murdered his wife Cora.
After Cora disappeared in 1919, a search of the house ultimately found human remains under the brick floor of the basement in Crippen’s house. By then he and his lover Ethel Le Neve (disguised as a boy) had fled to Canada on board Montrose. The case achieved some notoriety because this was the first time that a suspected criminal had been apprehended following a wireless report from a ship at sea after the pair had been identified by the ship’s captain. The pair were bought back to face trial in England by a Scotland Yard detective who had gone out to meet them on a faster ship. Though Le Neve was acquitted, Crippen was found guilty and hanged in Pentonville Prison in November 1911.
At the time of the trial, forensic medicine was in its infancy, but Sir Bernard Spilsbury found a piece of skin with what he claimed was an abdominal scar consistent with Cora Crippen’s medical history. However, in 2007 forensic scientists from Michigan State University showed that mitochondrial DNA evidence proved that the remains found beneath the cellar floor were not that of Cora Crippen.
And on that basis a relative of Crippen, James Crippen of Dayton, Ohio, asked for the case to be reviewed.
However, the Commission found that he was not a ‘properly interested person’ in the case and that there was no real possibility the Court of Appeal would hear it. They further stated that the ‘person should be the widow or widower, ‘personal representative’, or a relative who has a ‘substantial financial or other interest’ in the appeal.’
I don’t know whether there are any other avenues open to Mr Crippen to clear his famous relative’s name, but it looks as if a miscarriage of justice was carried out, and it seems wrong to me that it cannot be corrected even at this late stage.
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English law is a bit ‘sniffy’ I feel sometimes.
Take Dr. Hawley Crippen for example. One of his distant relatives recently applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission to have the case referred to the Court of Appeal on the grounds that he had not, in fact, murdered his wife Cora.
After Cora disappeared in 1919, a search of the house ultimately found human remains under the brick floor of the basement in Crippen’s house. By then he and his lover Ethel Le Neve (disguised as a boy) had fled to Canada on board Montrose. The case achieved some notoriety because this was the first time that a suspected criminal had been apprehended following a wireless report from a ship at sea after the pair had been identified by the ship’s captain. The pair were bought back to face trial in England by a Scotland Yard detective who had gone out to meet them on a faster ship. Though Le Neve was acquitted, Crippen was found guilty and hanged in Pentonville Prison in November 1911.
At the time of the trial, forensic medicine was in its infancy, but Sir Bernard Spilsbury found a piece of skin with what he claimed was an abdominal scar consistent with Cora Crippen’s medical history. However, in 2007 forensic scientists from Michigan State University showed that mitochondrial DNA evidence proved that the remains found beneath the cellar floor were not that of Cora Crippen.
And on that basis a relative of Crippen, James Crippen of Dayton, Ohio, asked for the case to be reviewed.
However, the Commission found that he was not a ‘properly interested person’ in the case and that there was no real possibility the Court of Appeal would hear it. They further stated that the ‘person should be the widow or widower, ‘personal representative’, or a relative who has a ‘substantial financial or other interest’ in the appeal.’
I don’t know whether there are any other avenues open to Mr Crippen to clear his famous relative’s name, but it looks as if a miscarriage of justice was carried out, and it seems wrong to me that it cannot be corrected even at this late stage.
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