When Head and Heart Diverge.

I was reading up on Albert Pierrepoint tonight. He was Britain’s most celebrated public executioner in the decades leading up to the abolition of capital punishment.

I came to wondering how he must have felt when one of his ‘assignments’ – Timothy Evans – was posthumously pardoned after it came to light that Reginald Christie had done the deed all along, and that the police had suppressed evidence which would have got Evans acquitted.

No doubt his mind would have been untroubled. He was only doing his job after all; he wasn’t in any way responsible for the evidence, the verdict or the judgement. What effect it had on his heart, however, is another matter.