The Feilding Star. Oroua and Kiwitea Counties Gazette FRIDAY, MAY 31, 1907. Mistaken Leniency.

Feilding Star, Volume I, Issue 280, 31 May 1907, Page 2

The Feilding Star. Oroua and Kiwitea Counties Gazette FRIDAY, MAY 31, 1907. Mistaken Leniency.

If capital punishment is justifiable, and there is a good deal of room for argument on that point, it seems to us that the very grounds given for clemency in the case of Claude Paget are reasons for giving full effect to the sentence passed by the Judge. A man whose mental affliction leads him to fire a revolver three times at an unarmed girl is surely less fit to live than the man who commits a crime on the impulse of the moment, for some reason that might be taken as a palliation of the offence. In the Paget case we have failed to discover one redeeming feature. Tho man had been well treated by his victim and her relations, and there was not the slightest cause given for ( the terrible crime. It was evidently premeditated, as the purchase of the revolver and the presence of the man at such an early hour at the scene of the murder proved, ancT it is the veriest nonsense to urge that bo was in an epileptic fit when he find tho ; weapon three times at his uufortu--1 nate victim. Some day, prabio'y, ! the man will be released as sane, ami I the same morbid feeling which im . polled him to the present crime, will result in another life being sacn ficed to the maudlin sentimentality which human nature seems so •■•» d> to lavish on the worst class of criminals, providing their crime hn o ily bad enough and revolting enou^ii i to bring it to the front.