THE OFFENDERS Society and the Atrocious Crime.

Hardback. A book which tells in absorbing details the story of 6 criminal trials, 4 of them for murder, 1 for armed robbery, and one for high treason. It throws fresh light on the question of capital punishment, not all of the arguments put forward being palatable to 'contemporary abolitionists'. It also poses, directly and by implication, the whole question of relationship between the individual and society. The trials dealt with are those of Neville Heath, hanged in London in 1946 for the perculiarly repulsive murder of 2 women; Irma Grese, the notorious woman S.S. Guard at Belsen, at whose trial one of the authors was a prosecution witness; of the Rosenbergs, electrocuted in America in 1953 for giving atomic secrets to Russian agents. The other 3 are less well known - that of Rudi Brettinger, a 20yr. old youth found "not guilty by reason of insanity" of armed robbery at Baltimore; Joseph Redenbaugh, given life imprisonment for murder at the age of 19, also in the US; and Aake Horsten, a Swede, who murdered a girl with a hatchet and was sentenced to prison for 10yrs. Each of these cases has its psychopathological angle, each is used by the authors with great skill to point the question "what are the motives which induce societies the world over to condemn some men and women to death, to punish others by imprisonment, to treat some as mentally ill, to allow others to go scot free?" Illus. + Appendix and Bibliog. 278pp. 8vo. h/back. With tiny label to fpd, v. lightly browned edges o/w Vg+ with no mks. to covers.