Bøger af David Bentley

Following the success of David's earlier book, The Sheffield Hanged, this book covers the later period to the end of capital punishment in the United Kingdom.Covered in this book: William Smedley1875Charlie Peace1876James Hall1881Joseph Laycock1884Harry Hobson1887Robert West1889Edward Hemmings1893Harry Walters1905George Edward Law1913Lee Doon1922John William Eastwood1923Wilfred & Lawrence Fowler1925Lorraine Lax1925Samuel Case 1927Armin Kuehue & Emil Schmittendorf1945William Smedley194

While this book is certainly a 'local' book (published, written in, about and by A Sheffielder) its interest certainly lays beyond the searchers of the local history shelves.While its focus is on Sheffield crime, the collected tales of misery, despair and sheer desperation ring true for anywhere in that era and suggest that maybe things haven't changed all that much after all.The book also offers a fascinating insight into the procedure of law in the 18th and 19th Century and contains a wealth of little facts that are both intriguing and a tad macabre.

In this book, David Bentley, the author of The Sheffield Hanged 1750-1864 and The Sheffield Murders 1865-1965, has put together a fascinating pot pourri of legal tales drawn in the main from the nineteenth century. Grouped under four headings Tales from Sheffield and Beyond, Judges behaving badly, Petticoat Perjury and Gallows Tales, they include topics as diverse as the Pentridge Rising of 1817, the Sheffield chartist martyr, Samuel Holberry, grave robbing, the death of a judge in a Nottingham brothel, the capture of two Jesuit priests at Grindleford, inquest rigging by a shropshire coroner, the house at Stoney Middleton which was home to a nineteeth-century Lord Chief Justice, the muderess, Martha Browne, and her link with Tess of the Urbervilles, Sheffield's debtor's prisons, Charles Dicken's role in securing the dismissal of a London magistrate, an Irish rape prosecution which ended with the accused and accuser marrying in the judge's room while the jury were out considering their verdict and a baronet who acted as assistant executioner at a Carlisle hanging.

An account of the 19th-century criminal justice system as a whole, from the crimes committed and the classification of offences to the different courts and their procedure. The author looks at significant changes in the rules of evidence during the century and considers the fairness of the system.