Mercy Refused: Condemned Murderers Denied Reprieve in Eng-land and Wales, from Dr Crippen to Derek Bentley (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798192308950)

Between 1900 and 1964, every man sentenced to death in England and Wales had about three weeks to live and no idea whether he would. His case went to the Home Office in a buff folder - the judge's private report, the police file, the prison doctor, the petitions - and somewhere in Whitehall a minister decided. There was no hearing. The condemned man was not present, was not represented, and never learned what was in the papers that would kill him.

At the end, whichever way it went, no reason was given.

MERCY REFUSED follows fifteen of those files, from the wireless message that caught Dr Crippen in the Atlantic to the nineteen-year-old hanged at Wandsworth for a shot fired by somebody else.

• The poisoner who appealed to the judge as a fellow Freemason - and whose wife was acquitted on the same evidence
• The only English solicitor ever hanged, convicted on a packet of weedkiller in his coat pocket
• The brides in the bath: one charge, three deaths, and the ruling that still shapes English evidence
• Timothy Evans, hanged for a murder the man downstairs confessed to
• Derek Bentley, whose jury begged for his life and whose conviction took forty-five years to fall
• James Hanratty, cleared by four decades of campaigning - and convicted again by DNA in 2002

Four of these convictions have since been quashed or pardoned. One was confirmed by a science that did not exist when the man died. The rest will never be looked at, because nothing was written down that could show what went wrong.

Drawn from Home Office and Prison Commission records, Hansard, and the Court of Appeal judgments that finally reopened these cases, Mercy Refused is a cold, documentary account of a power that decided who lived - in private, on paper, and without ever explaining itself.

Book Two of THREE CLEAR SUNDAYS, following Condemned Women: Sentenced to Hang in England and Wales from the Edwardian Baby Farmers to Ruth Ellis.