THE DEATH PENALTY.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 116, 17 May 1924, Page 6

THE DEATH PENALTY.

An Australian newspaper has recently pointed out the absurdity of assuming that death by hanging is necessarily an instantaneous death. The body is, by regulation, left unexamined for twenty minutes, and post-mortems have revealed the fact that in some cases death has been the result of slow strangulation. When British authorities first decided upon hanging by the neck as the official method of destruction of criminals, we were still in many ways a savage people, and imagined that a more or less spectacular end to a criminal career was an effective deterrent to others of criminal tendencies. Public hangings and public floggings have long been forbidden and it is time that the final scene in the earthly life of a murderer was made less horrible and not made more so by the uncertainty of the actual mode of death. Criminals fear, not the rope and the drop, but extinction. A lethal chamber j would be more in accordance with modern ideas. The convicted man could be kept iv ignorance of the time of death, and by means of admitting cai'bon monoxide gas into his cell at night could be put painlessly, quickly, and certainly out of the world. lie j would (lie, probably in his sleep, and in any case with no worse symptoms I than a steadily increasing and* painless unconsciousness. Very little alteration to an ordinary cell would be required, in fact the "condemned cell" already in use could be converted into a lethal chamber without altering its interior' appearance, or permitting it to give nny ! indication of its use and purpose. Carbon | monoxide is odourless and colourless, I and can lie admitted to and mixed with | the air of an enclosed space Rilentlv, nor I is its preparation difficult. The sudden-' ness of a death Ims been supposed to | indicate its merciful character, but this I is not necessarily so, and the guillotine, j axe, eword, and rope, arc all more j horrible as a means of death than , almost natural extinction produced by the use of a lethal chamber. To give , a criminal alcohol or any other drug before an execution is an admission that the death is not of a merciful kind, and surely if any consideration is shown j to a criminal it should be at the time he I is going out into an unknown unimagined I future. I ■