JUST LENIENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume XIX, Issue 3960, 9 April 1883, Page 4

JUST LENIENCE.

An Allowable Crime,

The "Daily Telegraph" says: Upon William Bobei-ts, who was recently found guilty of manslaughter in shooting a collier called Edward Thomas, at Holywell, in Flintshire, Lord Coleridge has felt justified in inflicting the extremely mild sintence of one day's imprisonment. By law the penalty for manslaughter is elastic enough to include any term, from a single day to a whole life spent in prison; but it is rarely that a Judge mitigates the terrors of the law in oili-nces of this class. It may safely be said that the case which Lord Colt ridge had betore him at JVlold yesterday was one in which, if ever, a n>an might be considered to have a right to take the law into his own hands, even to the i-hcdding of the blood of n fellow-crcatnre. Thomas Thomas, bn.tbei of rdwi-rd, had been courting the wife o! vviliiim Koberts, before she marriid bim. I She had been iv service with the Thomases, j but last May she wedded Itobeits, the .stonemason, who lived in a lonely cottage on the Penybill Mountain, in Flintshire, tin tho nigbt of the 4th of November latt the two brotheis Thomas Rallied forth t) go to Bobert's cottage, and spent somehours on the road drinking at several public houses. At one of these Thomas Thomas boast ,d that he was going up to 1 Bobtrts's house, and said there would be a i row somewhere. The evidence of what | exactly happened when the men did ari rive-at their destination was contradictory; I but the jury and the judge appeared to be- ' lieve tbat au outrageous attack ou the honour of Bobeits's wife was intended, if not carried out, and that in defendiog her prisoner shothis victim. "It was I that enticed him to be shot," the surviving brother was heard to exclaim in an agony of remorse ; aud if Thomas Thomas, the former lover of Mrs Koberts, was known lo entertain feelings of jealousy, and induced his bother to go up to the house that night for a " a row," Vac object of the vn.it seems only too obvious. The prisoner no doubt broke the law; but, as Lord Coleridge said, he broke it "under every excuse that a man could possibly have;" for what provocation could be greater than this attempted in>ult and outrage by a discarded suitor upon a woman linked to another by the bond of a lawful marriage 1 The jury did well to reduce the crime from murder to manslaughter, and ihe judge was amply justified in giving the vigorous defender of his wife's honour a nominal sentence, considering that he had already spent between two aud three months in gaol while awaiting ttial,