Review: History of the Criminal Tribes in the Madras Presidency
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X3100400121 |
| Published date | 01 January 1931 |
| Date | 01 January 1931 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
158
THE POLICE JOURNAL
INSTIGATION
OF
THE
DEVIL. By
EDMUND
PEARSON.
lOS.
6d. net.
(Charles Scribner's Sons. New York. London.
1930.)
THEchapters of this book are, the author tells us, reproductions of articles he
has contributed to Vanity Fair, with additions to most of them of half a page
to four or five pages. A chapter is devoted to the Tichborne Case, but apart
from this the book deals mainly with the subject of murder, and most of the
cases dealt with are murders of bygone days in America, though cases as
modern as the Bywaters murder are touched upon in the course of his obser-
vations on murder and murderers in general.
The
murderers whose deeds are narrated at length range in social rank
from a French duke to a full-blooded Alabama negro. Though none of the
cases presents any remarkably unusual method of killing, there are circum-
stances about mostof them that put them outside the commonplace,and many
are interesting for the insight they giveinto the life and procedure of the times
and localities.
Throughout the book one findspassages indicating the author's contempt
for American methods of dealing with murder trials, particularly when the
person accused is a woman.
'New
York,' he says, ' has executed only one
woman in thirty years and only four or five in more than a century. All this
time women have been murdering blithely, right and left.' His observations
on detective novels, crook plays, female liars, imaginative witnesses, and
misplaced public sympathy with murderers, add to the interest of the book.
HISTORY OF
THE
CRIMINAL
TRIBES
IN
THE
MADRAS
PRESI-
DENCY. By E.
RAMACHANDRA
SASTRI.
(Sri Rama Press. Madras.)
THB
prime object of this book is presumably to instruct police officers and
others concerned with the administration of the criminal law in India in the
history, customs, and criminal methods of certain tribes in the Madras
Presidency habitually addicted to crime.
The
matter is set out on the lines
usually followed in manuals of this kind, and the book should prove useful to
the class of reader for which it is intended and to all whose interest in the
peoples of India extends beyond the more conspicuous elements of the
population.
TRIAL
OF
MOTOR
CAR
ACCIDENT
CASES. By A. D.
GIBB.
208.
(Sweet and Maxwell, Ltd.)
THIS
book-an
adaptation of an American work by a member of the New
York Bar and (as the author states in his preface) in part ' sheer translation '
of that
work-has
the merit of novelty for those who study legal text books
compiled on this side of the Atlantic.
The
method adopted is to set out
fJubatim all the questions which in varying circumstances should be put to
the witnesses called on behalf of the plaintiff and defendant in a ' running-
down'
action; and the points involved in each branch of the subject are fully
and carefully explained in the text. It is thus not only an '
ABC'
guide for
the practitioner in the preparation and conduct of Crunning-down ' actions,
but also a useful text bookon the law of negligenceon the highway.
A considerable part of the book is devoted to the two most important
witnesses-the driver and the injured pedestrian. Among other important
points affecting the driver we are told on page 62 that his legal position on
approaching a ' cross-roads' is now, thanks to a series of Scotch decisions,
pretty clearly defined, and that drivers on a main road have no rights superior
to those of drivers on a side road at a junction.
It
will be interesting to see
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