EPILEPSY AND CRIME.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17632, 8 December 1922, Page 2

EPILEPSY AND CRIME.

_4_ '•\ ME JUSTICE EOCHE'S SUGGESTION. The suggestion that the qnestionof sterilising persons with criminal impulses should be seriously considered was made by Mr Justice Eoche at the Old Bailey on October 13th, in sentencing Charles Edmund Seymour, 27, a tailor, to three years' penal servitudo for wounding Mrs Adeline Bles in Hyde Park. * Seymour attacked Mrs Bles, the widow of a Belgian officer, with a knife on September 19th. It was stated at the Police Court that he was an epileptic. "In my judgment," said Mr Justice Eoche, '' the medical profession of this country would be performing a public service if they studied earnestly the feasibility of sterilising both men and women with tendencies such as this man has. To allow them to reproduce is breeding from the worst of all stock and propagating disease and crime. "I am expressing no opinion as to whether it is feasible or whether Parliament should pass bucli a measure. It would depend on the examination by skilled persons as to the feasibility of it and the risks." Dr. East, medical officer of Brixton Prison, said Seymour was undoubtedly an epileptic, and he had lost employment owing to fits. He would know what he was doing, and know it was wrong. Mr Justice Eoche said he pitied Seymour, as he did all epileptics. He could not be Bent to aa asylum, and in the interests of society he must be shut up for a long time. Sir James Crichton-Erowne, the eminent surgeon, has advocated prevention by law of the marriages of unfit persons. An American judge recently ordered a woman to submit to an operation to make further motherhood impossible." ~, In the "British Medical Journal recently Dr. K. H. Vercoe suggests compulsory sterilisation of mental defectives and habitual criminaiS.