Got this in a double offer with The Man Who Lost His Wife (reviewed here last month). This was the one that caught my eye, the one I really wanted - but it turns out I was much more interested in the novel. This is non-fiction, stories of famous cases in which Symons argues the accused should never have been convicted, let alone hanged.
What it actually is is three longish accounts of cases in which there really was precious little doubt: Steinie Morrison which was a cause celebre in the first half of the Twentieth Century; the famous porthole case in which a South African minor star was shoved out of the titular porthole and never found; and a squalid saga of feckless husband murdering miserable wife - the Yarmouth Murder, which I was unfamiliar with. In the latter two cases there is surely no conceivable doubt who did it; Symons' arguments are spurious and take precious little account of the judicial decision-making process. Obviously I agree that the killers should never have been hanged; the death penalty is always and inexcusably barbaric. Steinie Morrison, however, was not hanged. Because there was some doubt (whether it was 'reasonable doubt' is arguable), his sentence was commuted and he died in prison.
The book is padded out with short accounts in which by and large nobody was convicted, though there is precious little doubt who killed the Earl of Erroll or the somewhat unpleasant Sir Harry Oakes. The one that caught my imagination was the apparently pointless murder of taxi driver Evelyn Foster in January 1931 (in fact, though, the chapter is so hastily put together that I had to Google the date).
It's a book very much of its time (1960) and we should remember, back then hanging was still going on in Britain. I'm not at all sure which side of the debate Symons was on.
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