Released 1991
Stars  Christopher Eccleston, Paul Reynolds, Tom Courtenay, Eileen Atkins
Directed by Peter Medak

Two frightened boys are cornered on a rooftop by a policeman. They were trying to break into a building. One of the boys has a gun. The policeman, cool and collected, reaches out a hand and asks the boy to hand the gun over. The other boy says, "Let him have it." The boy with the gun pulls the trigger, and shoots the officer.

What did those four words, "Let him have it," really mean? There are two possibilities: "Hand over the gun!" Or, "Shoot him!" Because a jury settled on the second possibility, a retarded youth named Derek Bentley was put to death in a British prison, a few years after the second World War.

The Bentley case has stirred uneasily in the British psyche ever since, refusing to rest. Over the years the conviction has grown that a harmless young man, mentally incapable of responsibility for his own actions, got into the wrong place at the wrong time and said tragically the wrong words. In his reconstruction of the trial, Medak is unforgiving, showing a legal system less concerned with justice than with proving itself correct. The judges in their wigs and majesty gaze down on hapless Derek Bentley, who wants to please, who fears death, who can find no voice for his own view of things in this merciless system. And so he goes to his death.

Summary by Roger Ebert