A reader sent me this story in Italian by Isaia Invernizzi from Il Post, which she calls “an online Italian newspaper that often has surprising little pieces like this,” and provided her own “hasty translation,” which I will share here; it’s an awful situation that reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (see this 2010 post):
Transcribing an intercepted conversation in dialect between a murder trial defendant and his mother appeared to be a simple enough task that would lead to a rapid verdict. Instead, a court in Udine ran up against an unexpected problem last year: when the court-appointed Foggian dialect interpreter began listening to the conversations, he realized he could understand almost nothing. The defendant and his mother were from San Severo, a town in the province of Foggia in Puglia, so they were speaking the dialect of San Severo, a more local one that differs from Foggian. The interpreter was forced to give up and the court had to look for an expert in Sanseverese, which took quite a while.
Still, when trials involve dialect, delays are the least serious of all possible consequences. There can be worse, including the worst kind of all: taking dialect too lightly can lead at times to tremendous miscarriages of justice.
Dialect is part of a more general problem related to wiretaps, which have been at the heart of many investigations in the last few years and have served as a basis for many convictions. The most significant overlooked risk in the use of wiretapping has to do with the accuracy with which recorded conversations are transcribed, because there are no uniform standards or official guidelines in Italy.
Each person entrusted with the job does it their own way: some will transcribe everything word for word, some just the most interesting exchanges, some will underline certain parts. There isn’t even a specific professional figure. Transcriptions are sometimes handled by the judicial police, sometimes by forensic transcribers who may have had very different kinds of training, sometimes by experts hired by the parties.
For years now, forensic linguists have complained about this haphazardness, which the courts tend to tolerate and excuse, backed by a 2018 ruling of the Cassazione that minimized such problems. It called transcriptions “a mere graphic transposition” of wiretaps. In actuality, though, many studies in Italy and elsewhere have shown that transcribing an intercepted call is much more complex than “graphic transposition,” just as speech itself is complex.
Aside from the content, it is important to consider the form, the pauses, the context and what is not said, the relationship between the speakers being recorded. There’s a saying among forensic linguists that an overly “clean” transcription is never a good one. Dialect adds another layer of complexity and difficulty to all this, a problem once again overlooked by the Italian judicial system.
Anyone transcribing a conversation in dialect is forced to use a normal computer keyboard and thus adapt the rules of Italian to the dialect they’re hearing. But however it is transcribed, dialect may be pronounced in various ways that cannot be reproduced with any precision in written form. “A written word could be pronounced in two completely different ways,” says Luciano Romito, professor of glottology and linguistics and head of the phonetics lab at the University of Calabria. “How do you transcribe the difference? And can we be sure that the magistrate or judge understands the difference? What’s more, our speech is ‘multimodal’ [i.e., can take place in different ways that also involve posture and tone of voice], and quite a bit depends on our intentions when uttering a word. In dialect, all of this becomes even more complicated.”
Many transcription errors can be made in the course of an investigation, and they are often carried over into the trial, all the way to the verdict. In some cases these errors themselves can lead to wrongful convictions. The story of Angelo Massaro is a perfect example. Massaro was arrested on May 15, 1996, on the charge of having killed a man, Lorenzo Fersurella, in the province of Taranto. The prosecutor called for his arrest based on a conversation intercepted in 1995 during an investigation into a drug dealing ring that Massaro was involved in, which ended in a ten-year prison sentence for him.
One phrase in particular was singled out of the covert recordings made during the drug investigation. Talking to his wife on the phone a week after Lorenzo Fersurella’s disappearance, Massaro said a phrase in dialect that was misinterpreted: “I’m hauling this muers.” Muers, in Apulian dialect, is a term for something heavy and bulky, like the sled that Massaro was carrying on his roof rack. In the report, muers became muert, dead man. In 2017 Massaro was found innocent after spending more than twenty years in prison because of a mistranscribed consonant.
Another problem linked to dialect has to do with the identification of the speaker, a task that, like transcription, is entrusted to people without specific training. “When voices are speaking in dialect, the comparison between them becomes more complicated and uncertain, in part because there’s no database that includes dialects,” says Mirko Grimaldi, head of the interdisciplinary linguistic research center at the University of Salento. “You need in-depth studies into the unique dialectical characteristics of a given geographic area, which may be very small. One has to analyze the use of vowels, the exclusion of certain words. In short, it’s not at all simple.”
In 2017, Grimaldi conducted the speech analysis that led to the release of Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, an Eritrean man who was 29 at the time and had been in prison for a year and a half. He was accused of being Medhanie Yehdego Mered, a 35-year-old from Eritrea, one of the leaders of a large Libya-based organization involved in migrant traffic to Europe. The evidence presented by the prosecution was based on voice analysis software that was unable to recognize Tigrinya, the Eritrean language spoken by Medhanie Yehdego Mered in the intercepted conversation, and thus was not very reliable. Grimaldi’s findings confirmed that the prosecutor had indeed made a mistake. […]
According to Romito, there is an overreliance on transcriptions among magistrates and judges, who consider them almost always accurate and irrefutable. “When I’m called in as an expert, if what I say doesn’t match up with what the public prosecutor is claiming about the transcriptions, then the problem becomes me, not the transcription,” he says. “Judges could ‘go back to the tape,’ as they say: listen to the recordings and maybe realize that they’re not easy to make out, that there’s too much noise and so the wiretaps are unusable. But they almost never do that.”
This general sloppiness in dealing with wiretaps, especially those in dialect, derives in large part from the fact that the transcribers are not certified professionals; they are paid very little for transcribing hours and hours of intercepted conversations, and they only have temporary contracts. On March 19, the labor unions organized a national strike precisely to demand better working conditions in this field. […]
You’d almost think court systems care more about process than justice. Thanks, Johanna!
I don’t know if dialect was involved, but I believe the conviction of one of the last men (maybe the last man?) executed in Great Britain depended on the interpretation of a spoken phrase “Let him have it” [the gun].
Let Him Have It was somewhat different: the words were not in doubt, only the intended meaning.
And it didn’t occur to anybody to listen to the recording to find out why the defendant insisted he hadn’t said what was in the transcript…
Ah. The weight of tradition.
And to think I’m grumpy because the four reviewers of my latest manuscript, plus the editor, haven’t given any hint they ever looked at the supplementary information – the copiously annotated dataset, in other words my interpretation of the literature, the part where I’m much more likely to have made mistakes than in the “main text”.
And it didn’t occur to anybody to listen to the recording to find out why the defendant insisted he hadn’t said what was in the transcript…
After several months he probably wouldn’t have remembered the conversation one way or another, and probably would have had no way to reconstruct what he actually said.
DM “the four reviewers of my latest manuscript, plus the editor, haven’t given any hint they ever looked at the supplementary information.”
Mention the dataset early in the abstract and in the introduction.
I’m not sure where to park this, but since it’s a question of translation that relates to a crime…
From the latest New Yorker, an article on the archaeological recovery (meaning looting) of an 18th century shipwreck in Brittany, the author writes that one protagonist’s mother called him “a chatterbox and a lockbox.” He’s French pied noir from Tunisia. Does this turn of phrase import its repetition from French? That is, do the French words both include the idea of a box? Lockbox seems straightforward, but chatterbox seems somewhat arcane, and I’m a little surprised that it would be or have a calque.
In the U.S. I think one would generally expect the underlying recordings to be made available to defense counsel in advance in order to give them an opportunity to dispute the accuracy of whatever transcription-or-translation the prosecution is offering. I don’t know what the Italian system does.
it is fairly common in the U.S. for prosecutors to offer expert witnesses with purported expertise in criminal slang or argot, who will tell the jury that the mysterious or banal phrase the defendant uttered (whether in English or Spanish or some third tongue) actually meant in context “can you get me three kilograms of cocaine” or what have you. But again the defense is supposed to have an opportunity to challenge the reliability or plausibility-in-context of that evidence.
It should be noted that “dialect” in English and “dialetto” in Italian are pretty much false friends: “dialetto” refers to traditional languages that were widely spoken and were most people’s native languages until television popularized Italian in the 50s, and are still very used in the countryside or among old people. They’re usually mostly unintelligible to most native Italian speakers – which makes this kind of misunderstanding sound more reasonable
In general, sure, but… I’m pretty sure I, for one, didn’t talk about hauling a corpse around a few months ago or ever…
I did.
>In general, sure, but… I’m pretty sure I, for one, didn’t talk about hauling a corpse around a few months ago or ever…
Which is an interesting bit of evidence, frankly. I don’t know Italian legal procedure at all, but if he was present for a proceeding in which someone made a big deal of this quote and didn’t object, to me that would be evidence that whatever he may have said in that particular wiretap, he thought he might have told his wife he was hauling a corpse around.
Maybe JW or someone knows more about what suspects see and hear during a trial. I wasn’t an Amanda Knox case enthusiast.
I would still see it as prosecutorial misconduct, which in the US can get actual perpetrators freed – You can’t tolerate prosecutors putting fake quotes in someone’s mouth in the hope they won’t feel confident denying it.
But if that’s the situation, that he did hear the translation and didn’t contradict it, it definitely limits my sympathy for the guy who spent years in prison.
I know very little about the details of Italian criminal procedure other than that it’s a radically different system than we have and often appears at first glance (to an observer accustomed to our system) to be barbarous and primitive. It’s of course possible that that perception is influenced by the assumption that long-standing features of our own particular and distinctive cultural practices are by definition the correct and civilized way to do things.
Well, The Supreme Court Said That Evidence of Innocence Is Not Enough (archived).
It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the right-wing bastards on the US Supreme Court basically just hate people. Comes of being from Alpha Draconis, I expect.
[Apropros of which, I note that all reference to the Lizard People has been removed from the WP article on Alpha Draconis. They’ve obviously got to WP. We are so doomed.]
Per the talk page, the Icke gospel only states that some Lizard People are from somewhere in Draco, not specifically Thuban. The latter theory is heresy or tabloid sensationalism.
Arguably it’s worse. The mentioned Scalia was a sociopath – he loved the law and didn’t care about people at all, one way or any other. He was Lawful Neutral.
That, on the other hand, is awesome.
Scalia was a sociopath, but was not lawful neutral, though that was the image he wanted to cultivate. He was an activist. The original intent theory which he supposedly followed was meant to minimize the application of constitutional civil liberties. Conversely, he was generous in his interpretation of the constitution when it came to gun ownership or, say, to calling the exchange of money protected speech. The decisions he wrote were often light on the airtight logic that makes for respected and lasting precedents, and were well-padded with bluster and sarcasm.
one would generally expect the underlying recordings to be made available to defense counsel in advance […] the defense is supposed to have an opportunity to challenge the reliability or plausibility-in-context of that evidence.
in theory only.
in practice, u.s. prosecutors do not make anything available that isn’t specifically requested (with all requests being interpreted as restrictively as possible) during the discovery phase of a case, which they do their utmost to ensure never arrives by pressuring defendants and their lawyers to settle cases through plea deals – using exactly this kind of ‘smoking gun’ evidence as a major part of that pressure.
@rozele: sure, but a U.S. defense lawyer of median competence in a serious case would routinely ask for “any tape recordings of my client or transcripts thereof.” Taking a plea, which is indeed the most typical resolution, can sometimes mean (for both sides) not knowing what all the trial evidence might be and its strengths or weaknesses for the prosecution.
But w/o getting into the finer details, Italy has to at least some extent what is usually called in the (Anglophone) literature an “inquisitorial” system for handling criminal matters,* which is conceptually so different from the Anglo-American “adversarial” system that it can be hard for those accustomed to the latter (warts and all …) to get their heads around it. The first-blush reaction (from an Anglo-American POV) is often that the judge seems to be working as a team with the prosecution rather than being a supposedly (I did say warts and all …) impartial referee between the prosecution and defense. I’m sure the defenders of such systems would say that’s not a completely fair characterization. Googling suggests that some defenders of such systems are trying to get the standard scholarly Anglophone adjective for them changed away from “inquisitorial,” which may sound inherently pejorative to many Anglophone ears because of the capital-I Inquisition.
*If you trust Italian wikipedia, it’s “sistema inquisitorio” in Italian parlance. It says the current Italian system post some late Eighties reforms is not purely “inquisitorio” but a “sistema misto” (= “mixed system”).
ETA: the same Italian wikipedia article suggests that the modern trend in Europe has been to move to varying extents away from the pure inquisitorial system as its deficiencies have become more widely perceived but that the Serenissima Repubblica di San Marino still preserves it in its undiluted 19th-century glory, having not revisited the basic structural question since enacting its Codice di Procedura Penale del 1878.
I thought the defining feature of an inquisitorial system was a judge that autonomously searches for evidence, which Italy eliminated for criminal proceedings almost four decades ago.
I’d be genuinely curious to learn what other features of current Italian (or more broadly civil-law) criminal procedure feel radically different, with a hint of barbarous primitivity, to US lawyers!
In this case, anyway, the presumption that the defense lawyer was of median competence or better seems questionable. The only ruling that can be easily found online is from the supreme court (Corte di Cassazione) ordering a retrial. The reasoning in that ruling is no less damning for the original defense lawyer than for the appeals court.
The argument is that the defense always had disculpating evidence and witnesses to present, but declined to do so in the original trial. The appeals court wrongly ruled that the evidence was thus old and didn’t warrant a retrial. Fortunately albeit belatedly, the supreme court ruled that what mattered was only that the evidence was new to the court, so the defendant was entitled to a retrial to present evidence the defense should have presented at the first trial but failed to.
Even the wrongly convicted defendant doesn’t seem to dispute this assessment. He rightly complains that the police and DA had disculpating evidence but ignored it — a cherry-picking that’s explicitly forbidden in Italy, and I’d hope also in the U.S. On the other hand, if I read correctly some of his interviews, he admits they didn’t bother calling defense witnesses at the original trial because they felt the prosecution’s case was too weak to need a rebuttal.
Returning to matters of linguistic interest, the published transcript of his remarks at a 2020 congress on wrong convictions gives the twin dialectal terms as stu muerzu and stu muertu.
I might add, without exculpating the police and DA for a wrongful conviction, that the latter term is transparent to all Italians, while the former is quite mysterious. Admittedly it means little that it’s mysterious to me, coming from the opposite end of the country. However, the defendant was born in Fragagnano, which is ten miles from Taranto and depends from it administratively (including for justice and police) but apparently speaks Brindisi dialect. And these are dialects from distinct groups, one apparently closer to Neapolitan and the other to Sicilian. I cannot judge whether muerzu is a word used in Brindisi, Taranto, both or even neither.
What part of fiat justitia ruat caelum do you people not understand?!
“The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.” [Heart of Darkness]
Having a lawyer who does a subpar job is a risk in pretty much any system in which criminal defendants have lawyers. How easy it is for a convicted defendant to get a do-over on that basis varies – in current U.S. practice it’s possible in theory but difficult-but-not-impossible in practice (this is the so-called Strickland doctrine). In terms of the prosecution’s obligations (however theoretical), one threshold problem is going to be good-faith v. bad-faith – did the prosecutors know that they were working with an inaccurate transcription, or had they delegated the job to someone of typical-for-the-context competence and had no particular reason to doubt the accuracy of the result and double-check their work? That the transcription they got was good for their case may have of course created a sort of confirmation-bias disincentive to go back to the transcriber and say “really? are you sure that’s what he said?”
FWIW, while “disculpate” is allegedly extant as an English word, in U.S. legal jargon we would pretty uniformly say “exculpating evidence.” I don’t know the respective Latin etyma well enough to know what sort of semantic drift there may have been.
Neither disculpo nor exculpo seems to have existed in Classical Latin; Georges (whose Handwörterbuch aimed at a complete coverage of Latin until ca. 600) only has exculpo as a spelling variant for exsculpo, which is something completely different.
Probably not a miscarriage of justice, but another example of dialect translation in court: My Spanish teacher Cipriano Vigil told our class about a time in his youth in New Mexico when he was called on to translate the defendant’s pachuco Spanish, which the judge didn’t understand, to standard Spanish. The words I remember are ruco ‘old man’ (which can mean husband or boyfriend but in this case was a literal description of the victim), lechuga ‘lettuce, U.S. currency’, and ranfla ‘car’ (Nash Rambler).
The defendant and his mother were from San Severo, a town in the province of Foggia in Puglia…
However, the defendant was born in Fragagnano, which is ten miles from Taranto and depends from it administratively (including for justice and police) but apparently speaks Brindisi dialect. I cannot judge whether muerzu is a word used in Brindisi, Taranto, both or even neither.
The word muers as reported in the newspaper articles looks like an apocopated form of muersu, which would correspond to standard Italian morso ‘bite; bit (horse tack); etc.’. On the semantic side, I suppose ‘morso’ could develop into ‘oggetto di grande dimensione’ or ‘peso morto’. Some online glossaries (made by local enthusiasts for popular use, it seems) include words more or less like the muers from the transcript. This online glossary for the city of Manduria includes muerzu ‘morso, nel senso di pezzetto’, while this online glossary for Taranto includes morso (muers), glossed ‘espressione usata per potenziare l’aggettivo seguente’. Perhaps our muerzu, muers, etc., is not the direct correspondent of standard Italian morso, however?
The diphthong in muerzu would result from metaphony of a low-mid vowel originally conditioned by a high vowel in the following syllable. This metaphony is typical of the regional Romance languages of Apulia. A classic description is Francesco Ribezzo (1912) Il dialetto apulo-salentino di Francavilla Fontana. (Francavilla Fontana is midway between Taranto and Brindisi.) For muert in the erroneous transcription of the telephone conversation, compare the following paradigm from Northern Salentino adapted from Calabrese (1985), based on Ribezzo, I believe:
Subsequent reduction of unstressed vowels and apocope morphologize the alternations in Salentino varieties. The alternations perhaps reflect an earlier paradigm like the following (historical analyses differ in details):
Note isogloss 1 on the map on page 311 of Grimaldi and Calabrese (2022) for the distribution of this diphthongization.
For the alternation of spellings rs and rz, note (going back to Foggia) the following change in §42 on page 37 in Giacomo Melillo (1920) Il dialetto di Volturino (Foggia): saggio fonetico-morfologico. This change found in many regional languages of Italy. For discussion of this phenomenon in Salentino in particular, note section 2.4.3. Affricazione di /s/, with footnote 23, on page 166 in Antonio Romano (2015) Proprietà fonetiche segmentali e soprasegmentali delle lingue parlate nel Salento (scroll down to Download this PDF file).
@Xerîb:
Thanks for your detailed comments.
While I should preface that my expertise on the topic is non-existent, I’d venture that most Italians have had enough exposure to Southern dialects (especially Neapolitan) to have an immediate guess about both the diphthongization and the vowel reduction.
In particular, Italian il morto (the dead man) is famously enough Neapolitan ‘o muorto, whose final vowel I hear as reduced to schwa at most. I could happily write ‘o muort’, though I believe that’s not an accepted Neapolitan spelling.
It somehow comes as no surprise that further south the vowels should migrate to ‘u muertu or ‘u muert’ depending on how one prefers to write the final reduced vowel.
The affrication doesn’t help, but I don’t think it’s a big deal either. Italians (very much including myself) have a hard time transcribing ‘a vita è ‘nu muorzo as sung (but surely not coined) by Pino Daniele: is it muorzo or muorz’? Possibly muorzu, or muorso, or muors’? How many elision marks should you write down, and where exactly do they go? But we don’t have a hard time understanding he’s saying that la vita è un morso, life is just one bite.
Accordingly, I don’t think it would be hard to hear and understand and transcribe either muers’ or muerzu in a sentence where something like “a bite” would make sense in Italian, even stretching the Italian. Nobody says that “la vita è un morso” where I’m from. At least they didn’t when I still lived there a couple of decades ago: I cannot rule out the subsequent triumph of Southern idioms carried on the wings of Neapolitan song.
The problem is that the standard extended meaning of “a bite” in Italian is exactly the one on display in the song-worthy Southern idiom and in the online glossary for the town of Manduria: “a little bit.” Likewise, in De Vincentiis’s (1872) Tarantine-Italian dictionary, muerso is recorded as an adverb meaning poco, “a little.”
How on Earth do you get from “a little bit,” “a little,” to “a bulky object,” “a dead weight?” Antiphrasis?
On this narrow linguistic point, I still sympathize with the police transcribers. If Rohlfs or some other leading expert in Apulian dialects says “a bite” means “a bulky object” down there, I’m grateful for the lesson. But if it’s just the defendant saying so when it obviously suits him …
There’s a documentary about the case:
https://www.downtowndocfest.ca/2023/02/23/dead-weight-peso-morto/
The local Gazzetta di San Severo agrees with the idea of translation error. They have a slightly different rendition – he was “maneuvring” a “mechanical shovel”, presumably an excavator, and muers means “ingombrante”. I later found an article that called it a bobcat. This must be where the “sled” came from. Someone misunderstood bobcat as bobsled. Translation errors in an article about translation errors.
I see an online translation of ingombrante as cumbersome. And I can see how something cumbersome might have been called a “bite”, evolving from the idea of the strap biting into your shoulder.
What’s a little weirder is San Severo’s newspaper describes this son of San Severo blandly as a Puglianese. (And muers as a word in Puglianese dialect.) On the one hand, there may be a plausible mistranslation. On the other, the range of places he’s “from” seem to offer an opportunity for dialect shopping… “There must be some dialect around here where something that sounds like dead body means something completely different.”
I’m looking for a better account. I’m still not really satisfied with the story. I’d think such a horrendous miscarriage would have resulted in someone, somewhere, actually giving more details than we’ve found yet.
HuffPost Italy back in 2017 had the amazing anecdote that this wasn’t the first time Massaro was falsely convicted of homicide, and that the first time around, he got a payout of “10 milioni di lire.” HuffPost references a Corriere della Sera article I haven’t found.
Massaro says he was the perfect sacrificial goat, because he had drug convictions. In the later case, prosecutors said he killed his friend to get rid of a competing drug seller.
The Puglia Daily (Quotidiano di) quotes him this way in 2017:
«L’hanno interpretata male. Io ho detto “mors” per dire peso. Mi riferivo ad un bobcat che stavo trasportando. Loro hanno tradotto come “morto”.
Here it’s mors, not muers.
Oh, cripe! Holy F**k! Corriere della Sera quotes him as saying he said muert:
Non pensavo che quattro anni dopo avrei vissuto lo stesso incubo — dice Angelo Massaro — per una intercettazione telefonica in cui dicevo a mia moglie, in dialetto, “tengo stu muert”, cioè “ho questo morto, questo peso morto”, un Bobcat che trasportavo nel carrello agganciato all’auto e che dovevo lasciare prima di andare a prendere mio figlio per accompagnarlo a scuola.
And he himself seems to derive it / relate it to morto – that is, it’s not a bite. It’s dead weight. (Hence the film title, Peso Morto.” This isn’t a problem of dialect after all. It’s more like the “Let him have it” case, where the issue is what to make of someone saying essentially, “I’m carrying a dead (body/weight).”
I don’t see how that frees him. What seems to have freed him is that later judges believed his girlfriend’s testimony that he was with her.
The whole situation just makes me think the judicial system that tried this case is corrupt. It’s hard for me to know whether the corruption took place in the 90s, in 2017, or both.
Notably, his previous case gave him the largest ever payment for a wrongful conviction in Italy, and he says here he’s going to sue again.
The linguistic question for me now is what does “tengo” mean in dialect? And maybe Giacomo can tell us more about it’s range of meanings in Italian. Massaro quotes himself “tengo stu muert”, and if everything is cognate with Italian, the usual meaning would be “I hold/keep this dead (body/weight).” Can you tenere a dead body? How about a Bobcat? Would it mean “hold onto” — I’m keeping the Bobcat overnight”?
I’d love to see the whole transcript. “This dead weight” seems pronominal; it needs an antecedent in the conversation. “This dead body” could more easily be a previously known subject between them.
“Tengo” means “I hold/keep” in the standard, but in Neapolitan, as no doubt in many (most?) other Southern dialects, it famously extends to “I have”, while the cognate of Italian “avere” is mostly restricted to use as an auxiliary or in some fixed phrases.
So, I guess that “tengo ‘stu muer[s?/t?/z?]” could be readily understood in context as “I have this dead weight (with me/to deal with)”. At least, that’s how I would understand the Italian equivalent in the context of an everyday conversation.
Wow, thanks for that dogged detective work, Ryan!
You’re thinking ot the Bentley~Craig case in 1952, which created a major controversy and contributed to the abolition of capital punishment. The Wikipedia article “Derek Bentley” gives a complete and (as far as I remember) accurate account of it, so I won’t try to summarize it. I don’t think there was any dialect aspect: both Bentley and Craig were Londoners and surely spoke in a way that was easily understandable.
You were right to say “Great Britain” rather than “the UK”, because the abolition in 1965 didn’t apply to Northern Ireland.
Bentley wasn’t the last man hanged, but there were not many after him.