chunk: Penrose is presented in a glowing light throughout – "never anything but modest and dutiful; he always tries his best to do his bit" – but, ultimately, is failed by the system. He faces his trial honestly, without pleading circumstances ("The real charge was that I'd lost my nerve – and I had. And I didn't want to wangle out of it like that") but it is clear that whilst he is strictly guilty of the charge ("on the only facts they had succeeded in discovering it could hardly have been anything else") justice, by any sense of the word, had not been done to him.
  "...[and] that is all I have tried to do. This book is not an attack on any person, on the death penalty, or on anything else, though if it makes people think about these things, so much the better. I think I believe in the death penalty – I do not know. But I did not believe in Harry being shot.
  That is the gist of it; that my friend Harry was shot for cowardice – and he was one of the bravest men I ever knew."