Ramya Nagesh: Any One of Us, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

What if you committed a crime that wasn't your fault?

It's a cold, grey morning. You open the front door, slightly hungover and fairly exhausted, and stop in your tracks. Lying bloodied and beaten on the driveway is the motionless body of your father. He is dead - killed in a violent frenzy. You don't remember what happened, and in fact you never will, but, you will soon discover, you are the one who killed him...

In Any One of US, Ramya explores the strange and often terrifying cases like this one. Cases featuring ordinary people who have committed extraordinarily evil acts through no fault of their own. They include Christine English, who was found by a court in 1981 to have been suffering from severe pre-menstrual syndrome when she accelerated her car at her boyfriend and crushed him to death. Or Brian Thomas, who could never have predicted that in 2008 his night terrors would make him unconsciously strangle to death the love of his life. Or nurse William Quick, whose defence for brutally beating a patient was his diabetes.

None of these people were evil, nor were they what we would consider criminally insane. They were ordinary people, just like us. And yet they faced charges for the most serious offences in our country. Through an examination of their cases, this book asks the pressing and often uncomfortable question: how can we be sure that we will never find ourselves in their place?