Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard

William Edgar Rayner Goddard, Baron Goddard (1877 to 1971) was a British judge who served as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary from 1944 to 1946 and then as Lord Chief Justice of England from 1946 to 1958, the first Lord Chief Justice appointed by a Labour government and the first to hold a law degree. Known for a stern and efficient approach to trials that earned him nicknames including the Tiger, he is regarded as one of the last of England's hanging judges for his strict views on criminal sentencing, and he presided over the controversial 1952 trial of Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig, in which Bentley was hanged despite a jury recommendation of mercy that Goddard, in a 1970 interview, later said should have been granted. In a 1951 ruling he struck down the power of the police to demand identity cards from citizens without cause, and he continued judicial work after his 1958 retirement from the chief justiceship until fully retiring in 1964, dying in London in 1971 at the age of 94.