Reprieve. By John Resko. (McGibbon and Kee, 18s.) Twenty minutes
before he was to go to the electric chair, having eaten his last supper, the young murderer John Resko was reprieved—to nineteen years in Dannemora, as long as Valjean did in the galleys : some of them years when the cells were infected with bugs and rats, the food with maggots and the guards with corrup- tion. In those nineteen years he taught himself to paint, and free men interested in his work got him released, to make his proper contribution to society. A more sophisticated kind of argument against the waste of capital punishment is to be found in Attorney for the Damned (Macdonald, 30s.), an anthology of speeches by Clarence Darrow, the great liberal advocate who defended Leopold and Loeb, among others, out-argued William Jennings Bryan in the Tennessee 'Monkey Trial'; never prosecuted anyone; and spoke out against race hatred, exploitation and legalised murder.
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