July 25th, 2011
The story of the murder of John Beckley on Clapham Common in 1953 encompasses knife crime, the coining of the phrase 'Teddy Boy', and a barrister by the name of Christmas Humphreys:
[Senior counsel for the prosecution] Humphreys wasn't your usual common or garden barrister, he was also the author of many works on Mahayana Buddhism. In fact Penguin had published his book Buddhism: An Introduction and Guide just two years previously in 1951 and has, somewhere in the world, remained in print ever since. Indeed Humphreys had founded the Buddhist Society in London in 1924 (it still exists and is now one of the oldest Buddhist organisations outside Asia) and was the most notable Buddhist in the country.
By the time of the Michael John Davies trial in the autumn of 1953 Christmas Humphreys had already had an extraordinary year. If he had been the sort of person who worried about what people thought of him (and he almost certainly wasn't) he would have wished the upcoming Clapham Common murder trial to be as uncontroversial as possible.
The reason why Humphreys might have hoped for a quiet, uncontroversial trial was that had already been involved in a couple of highly controversial cases involving the death penalty, cases that ended up leading to the suspension of the use of the death penalty for murder just a couple of years before Humphreys became a judge himself.
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July 3rd, 2010
Maciej Ceglowski on skeevy marketing practices in the online obituary business:
Things got decidedly sketchier a few weeks later, when legacy.com decided to email me a reminder that the guest book (which I had only posted to, not created) was about to meet a fate very similar to the person it was honoring if I didn't act promptly to renew, which, legacy.com suggested, would be the perfect way to show my support to a grieving family in a difficult time.
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June 30th, 2009
The Treptow crematorium in Berlin might just be the most imposing place of mourning in the world.
[Via deputy dog]
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