The authors take a scalpel to South Africa’s system of criminal justice during the Apartheid era. They focus on the case of the Sharpeville Six to analyse how criminal justice was used to make convictions easy to secure. Analysing the technicalities of the criminal law, as well as the quality of evidence and judicial reasoning in the case against the Six, Parker and Mokhesi-Parker also convey vividly through letters from death row, the sense these people made of their impending executions and how an international campaign to save their lives succeeded with only 18 hours to spare.