The Day the King Died

Book excerpt: There was a quaint British convention under which executions were stopped and sentence commuted if scheduled to take place on the day the sovereign died. Alfred Moore was doubly unfortunate: still protesting his innocence he was on the scaffold an hour before the death of King George VI was announced. Here, Jim Morris re-assesses the evidence in this case of the double murder of two police officers and shows why the trial at Leeds Assizes was a travesty of justice - packed with mistakes, inaccuracies, dubious recollections and supposition. Set against the social backdrop of 1950s West Yorkshire, the book stresses the need for caution where witness accounts may be driven by preconceptions or 'fit' too tidily and adds to the voices of those calling for justice in a case in which prosecutors almost certainly got the wrong man. 'I read the book with a growing sense of disquiet and unease and was left with a feeling that a terrible miscarriage of justice might well have occurred': Campbell Malone."