Pardons for Morant, Handcock and Witton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pardons for Morant, Handcock and Witton, three Australian soldiers, were sought from their court-martial convictions for the murder of Boer prisoners-of-war and local civilians during the Second Boer War.
Following four courts martial in early 1902, Lieutenants Peter Joseph Handcock and Harry "Breaker" Morant, of the Bushveldt Carbineers (BVC) of the British Army, were executed by a firing squad of Cameron Highlanders, in Pretoria, South Africa, on 27 February 1902, 18 hours after they had been sentenced. Lord Kitchener personally signed their death warrants.
Following the court recommending mercy in his case, the sentence of a third officer, Lieutenant George Ramsdale Witton, was commuted to life imprisonment by Lord Kitchener. Following public pressure, Witton was released on 11 August 1904, but never pardoned.
In 2009, an Australian military lawyer, Commander James William Unkles of the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, sent petitions for pardons for all three men to both Queen Elizabeth II and to the Petitions Committee of the Australian House of Representatives, but both governments declined them.
South Africans have often opposed pardons for Morant, Handcock and Witton. In a 2012 book published in South Africa, Charles Leach summed up the arguments against pardons, citing as precedents cases including: the 1474 trial of Peter von Hagenbach; the 1813 prosecution of Ensign Hugh Maxwell for murdering French POW Charles Cottier at Glencorse Barracks, Scotland during the Napoleonic Wars, and; the US Army court martial of Lieutenant William Calley and other soldiers responsible for the My Lai Massacre, during the Vietnam War. In addition, the "superior orders" defense argument, used by Major J. F. Thomas at the trial of Morant, Handcock and Witton, later gained notoriety. because many of those prosecuted for Nazi war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials attempted to use it; so many, in fact, that it became known as the "Nuremberg Defense".[1]