A Judge on Punishments.

Evening Star, Issue 7655, 4 July 1888, Page 3

A Judge on Punishments.

Mr Justice Matthew, in opening the Bristol Assizes yesterday, commenting on Mr Justice Day's view that for minor offences against persons or property sentences of long imprisonment were inexpedient and impolitic, said he was happy to think that view was beginning to spread largely among all those charged with the exercise of judicial duties in criminal matters. There was at one time an impression, originating, he believed, with a distinguished recorder of Birmingham, that the proper way of dealing with criminals was to go on accumulating the punishment in cases where a person might be charged with subsequent trivial offences after having been once convicted. But it was forgotten that in these days we far less required to inflict heavy punishment for minor offences than was the case formerly, because we had an extremely able and vigilant police, who had the means of identifying prisoners, which did not exist in former times. So that a person who had once gone wrong was generally known, and his movements were constantly watched by the police. He was led to make those observations by noticing a case on the calendar where a person sixty - eight years of age was charged with a small offence, and for a previous offence equally trivial the wretched creature was sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. He trusted that the remarks that had fallen from the Bench generally on the subject would be attended to throughout the country. In subsequently sentencing Julia Donovan, aged sixty-seven, for stealing a pair of stockings, he said she had been previously convicted several times for petty larcenies, arid, besides other punishments, had been sentenced to two terms of seven and eight years' penal servitude for little offences. He thought these sentences were both unjust and absurd, and ought never to have been passed; and he only sentenced her now to one day's imprisonment.