1932: Nine Minutes on the Gallows: the Longest Last Speech in Melbourne History
David Bennett spoke from the gallows for nine minutes, the longest statement ever made by a condemned man in Victoria. The 59-year-old painter and carpenter had walked to the scaffold calmly, and he spoke in a clear, steady voice. He was hanged in Melbourne for a capital assault committed in July 1932, the first execution in Victoria since 1924 and the first since 1891 for any crime other than murder. It was not his first such conviction. In Western Australia in 1911 he had been sentenced to life imprisonment and a flogging by a judge who told him: “You are not fit to live in this world.” He served just three years in Fremantle Gaol before the Attorney-General released him on legal doubts about the conviction, causing an outcry unprecedented in the state. Bennett moved east, and in 1930 he came forward to Melbourne detectives with information about a notorious unsolved murder. A man was arrested on his word, and was later found to be innocent. Bennett admitted nothing. He claimed his defence had never been properly put to the jury, and ended: “I repeat that I am not guilty, and again ask forgiveness from those whom I have wronged as I forgive those who have wronged me. Good-bye.”
