Author: Harriet Wistrich
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781911709268
RRP: £22
Harriet Wistrich became a solicitor in the 1990s after an earlier career as a film maker. She went on to handle some of the most high-profile cases in recent years, including the ‘spy cops’ scandal, the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005, and the overturning of the release on parole of the taxi cab rapist John Worboys in 2018. In 2016, she set up the Centre for Women’s Justice, which now regularly brings cutting-edge legal cases. In this book, which examines various cases from her career, she delivers a devastating indictment of a justice system that routinely fails female victims of male violence, and describes the catalogue of lawsuits and campaigns through which she sought to challenge it.
The first case featured in this book involved Sara Thornton, a woman serving a life sentence for killing her violent, alcoholic husband. As Wistrich argues,
