THROUGH THE HEAVENS FALL

London: Cassell and Co Ltd. Good/Good. 1956. Hard 8VO. Dust jacket complete, unclipped, tiny closed tears now in a clear protective sleeve. Black cloth boards with slightl faded gilt titling on spine. Previous W H Smith & Sons library book with labels on front.12 pages of half-tone illustrations. 251 pages clean and tight. Relevant newspaper clippings pasted onto rear paste down. In this book Lord Russell of Liverpool, who resigned the appointment of Assistant Judge-Advocate-General on the publication of his history of Nazi war crimes, The Scourge of the Swastika, spotlights various aspects of British justice over the past 200 years by selecting a variety of causes celebres which have raised unusual legal or moral issues. Each chapter deals with a particular point of contention, some being illustrated by a number of trials, others dealing at length with a single case. Wishful seeing, says Lord Russell, like wishful thinking, can make direct evidence as unreliable as circumstantial evidence; and he recalls the trial of Elizabeth Canning when 25 people swore to seeing in Middlesex someone whom 35 people testified they had seen at the same time in Dorset. Homicide cannot be justified by a plea of necessity, Lord Russell points out, and he quotes the case of two sailors tried for murder on the high seas because, in the extremity of starvation, adrift in an open boat, they killed and ate the cabin boy. Eight years ago the privilege of a peer to be tried by his fellow peers was abolished; the trials related by Lord Russell show the injustices this so-called privilege could cause in practice. When is a man who commits treason justifiably called a traitor? Three treason trials are cited to point the difference. .