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Ludovic Kennedy
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Pages: 320 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 1861973543
Pub: Profile Books Ltd
Pub date: 2002-06-24
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 592418
Reader Reviews:
A must for anyone interested in crime and innocence (0/0 people found this helpful)
I bought this book because it featured a chapter on a poor soul named Iain Hay Gordon, whom I was writing a dissertation on. The Gordon chapter captivated me, and I ended up reading the rest of the book really quickly.
I can't give the book five stars as Kennedy got it wrong about James Hanratty, but save for that (admittedly fundamental) error, the book is excellent. It sympathetically and passionately deals with the stories of those of miscarriages of justice, and extensively details all the evidential issues in question.
Even if it's not for use in an academic context, as it originally was for me, the book provides a highly entertaining and inspiring read.
Shame about chapter one . . . but the rest is good (2/3 people found this helpful)
It's a shame that Ludovic Kennedy uses his opening chapter for what amounts to a personal attack on Lord Goddard. Even that would be fine if it were restricted to his summing-up in the Craig and Bentley case, but Kennedy digs old and tired material wholly discredited by Fenton Bresler's biography (1977, George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.). In particular, the sexual allegations - made on the basis of hearsay in a largely unread book - are highly distasteful and (with unconscious irony) asks the reader to convict Goddard on the kind of evidence Kennedy (rightly) decries as forensically untenable. The rest of the book is an excellent and disquieting look at the English criminal justice system, police corruption and judicial naivety: it would have merited five stars but for being (arguably) undermined by the nasty and rather cowardly attack on a dead man. I note in passing that Hanratty, so long a poster-boy for critics of the justice system, is not mentioned presumably due to DNA evidence confirming his long-debated guilt, but there is plenty of food for thought here for people in all camps.
Categories
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Books -> Subjects -> Business, Finance & Law -> Law -> English -> Criminal