Dimensions
165 x 234 x 9mm
Pardons and reprieves in Britain from medieval times to the end
of hanging in 1964, comprising a collection of casebook stories,
covering issues in criminal justice such as legal defences of
insanity and provocation, from the days of savage punishment to
the more enlightened years when insanity was better understood.
The stories featured here are a mixture of the famous and the
obscure, including attempted assassinations of Queen Victoria,
the enigmatic Wallace case in Liverpool and the `not proven'
case of Jeannie Donald in Scotland. The emergence of the Royal
Pardon is also covered, as is the establishment of the Home
Office and the lawyers who worked for reform and more humane
attitudes to capital and physical punishment. The more recent
stories illustrate this vividly, as in the story of the
reprieved legless man in Lincolnshire in 1954, who had murdered
his girlfriend but was spared execution on compassionate
grounds.
