FLOGGING A TORTURE?

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 81, 5 April 1930, Page 20

FLOGGING A TORTURE?

A. man sentenced to ten years' penal servitude and fifteen strokes with the "cat" committed suicide in Wandsworth Prison, England, by jumping over the balcony outside his coll.

He crashed to death on the stone floor twenty feet below.

Although evidence, at the inquest pointed to the ten years and not the "cat" as being responsible, the affair has raised a great outcry in England against flogging, and the London "New Statesman" says:—-

"The case against the eat-o'-nine tails is twofold.

"It is a barbarous and brutal form of punishment, and it is not (pace Lord Darling and other men of law) a necessary or even, so far as one can judge, an effective deterrent.

"It is, in fact, a savage form of reprisal, a relij of the old doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Its brutalising efEect. is as great, or even greater, on the whipper than on the whipt, and Lord Darling's jeer at sentimentalists who approve of

OPINIONS HELD IN ENGLAND

boxing and denounce the 'cat' is beside the mark."

The above allusion to Lord Darling, formerly one of the most noted Judges on the Bench, is elicited by a statement he gave to tho London "Evening Star":—

"No one is-flogged except when he has been guilty of personal violence. "In my opinion, a public opinion which approves of prize-fighting, in eluding the knockout blow, can not. logically ,eoudemn flogging. "Men and women who flock to an exhibition between the ' Game Chick' and the 'Battling Brown,' would gladly see 'Burglar Bill' punished by ' the 'Wandsworth Walloper.' The Chancellor of the Exchequer might as well, set an entertainment tax on this as on the former exhibition."

Meanu-hJe London Press dispatches advise that the Hogging question has been raised in Parliament. A special committee, it is reported, may be appointed to consider the effect of corj poral punishment upon prisoners.