Notorious prisoner Charles Bronson to face public parole hearing
A two-day hearing will take place this week to decide if he should be freed
Britain's so-called 'most violent prisoner' Charles Bronson will face a public parole hearing this week as he makes his latest bid for freedom.
The Parole Board in London will review the case of one of the UK's longest-serving prisoners, to decide if he should remain behind bars, today and on Wednesday.
An application by Bronson’s lawyers to request the hearing takes place in public was granted last year.
Dubbed one of Britain’s most violent offenders, Bronson, who changed his surname to Salvador in 2014 after the artist Salvador Dali, has been in prison for much of the last 50 years, often spending time in solitary confinement or specialist units.
It is believed he is still being held at high-security HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.
Bronson previously said he was first sent to jail in 1968 and has held 11 hostages in nine different sieges – with victims including governors, doctors, staff and, on one occasion, his own solicitor.
He was sentenced in 2000 to a discretionary life term with a minimum of four years for taking a prison teacher at HMP Hull hostage for 44 hours. Since then the Parole Board has repeatedly refused to direct his release.
Bronson was the first prisoner to formally ask for a public hearing after rules changed last year to allow the public and press to observe proceedings in a bid to remove the secrecy around the parole process.
Russell Causley, who murdered his wife, Carole Packman, in the 1980s and never disclosed where he hid her body, made legal history in December when he became the first prisoner to face a public hearing.
The Parole Board has since ruled he can be freed from jail after breaching his licence conditions in 2021 following his initial release a year earlier.
So far no other requests for public parole hearings have been granted.