Pardons for Morant, Handcock and Witton

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.

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.

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.

"[2]—and, in November 2010, the UK Ministry of Defence issued a statement that the appeal had been rejected: "After detailed historical and legal consideration, the Secretary of State has concluded that no new primary evidence has come to light which supports the petition to overturn the original courts-martial verdicts and sentences".