Lord Lane of St Ippollitts: Lord Lane of St Ippollitts, who has died aged 87, was a former British lord chief justice whose progressive views on sentencing and liberty were overshadowed by his ruling in the Birmingham Six appeal.
During the 1987 appeal, after a lengthy hearing and a detailed analysis of the evidence at trial, Lane (sitting with two appellate judges) said: "The longer this case has gone on, the more convinced this court has become that the verdict of the jury [ at Lancaster crown court in 1975] was correct."
Four years later, the convictions were quashed on the grounds that the accuseds' confessions had been improperly admitted in evidence.
Thus Lane's long retirement was marred by the residual media hostility of one unremarkable judicial pronouncement that became so painfully remarkable.
By common consent of the British legal profession, Lane was a very great lord chief justice of England and Wales, an office he held from 1980 to 1992, in a period of great challenge for the outdated criminal law. In a stream of pellucid judgments, he did much to put the substantive criminal law on a modern footing.
No advocate in his court could possibly have had a more attentive hearing. His judicial record of impartiality was impeccable.
Lane's considerable intellectual qualities were not confined to the academic aspects of the substantive criminal law. When he came to the chief justiceship, the penal system was beginning to groan under the weight of prison overcrowding.
In two notable decisions in 1981, he proclaimed that prison sentences for non-violent offenders should be exceptional and, when imposed, should be no longer than necessary. As a fierce opponent of government interference in the judicial province, it was Lane who expressed outrage at the proposals to reform the legal profession put forward in 1989 by the then lord chancellor, Lord Mackay. In the House of Lords, Lane, in somewhat extravagant language, said: "Loss of freedom seldom happens overnight . . . oppression does not stand on the doorstep with a toothbrush and a swastika armband. It creeps up step by step, and all of a sudden the unfortunate citizen realises that freedom has gone."
While keeping a healthy public distance, he was always on good terms with previous lord chancellors.
But eschewing the media (to whom he had a built-in, almost unreasoning, hostility), he conducted affairs with the lord chancellor's department and the Home Office out of public view.
Geoffrey Dawson Lane was the son of a Lincolnshire bank manager. He was educated at Shrewsbury school and read classics at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he became an honorary fellow in 1981, and was awarded an honorary LLD in 1984). A notable scholar and sportsman, he had a likewise distinguished RAF war record, with an AFC in 1943, as a squadron leader.
He proclaimed that his greatest feat as a pilot was when, at the personal request of Winston Churchill, he flew his aircraft in dangerous circumstances to ensure the delivery of mail to the allied armed forces in north Africa.
He was called to the bar by Gray's Inn in 1946 and began practising on the Midland circuit. He became a QC in 1962, was a high court judge from 1966 to 1974, a lord justice of appeal from 1974 to 1979 and a law lord for a short period in 1979-80.
Outside the courtroom, Lane led a very private life, though when he did take part in public functions, he was always amusing, telling earthy, even risqué, jokes. His marriage to Jan lasted for 60 years; they had one son.
Geoffrey Dawson Lane, Lord Lane of St Ippollitts: born July 17th, 1918; died August 22nd, 2005