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 tbe actual mode of death. Criminals fear, not the rope and the droj), but extinction. A lethal chamber would be more in accordance with modern ideas. The convicted man could be kept in ignorance of the time of death, and by means of admitting cai'bon monoxide gas into his cell at night could lie put painlessly, quickly, and certainly out of the world. He would die, probably in bis sleep, and in any case with l no worse symptoms 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 any indication of its use and purpose. Carbon monoxide is odourless and colourless, and can be admitted to and mixed with the air of an enclosed space silently, nor is its preparation difficult. The suddenness of a death has been supposed to indicate its merciful character, but this is not necessarily so, and the guillotine, axe, sword, and rope, are all more 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 to a criminal it should be at the time lie is going out into an unknown unimagined future.