CONTRASTS OF JUSTICE.

Evening Star, Issue 10398, 20 August 1897, Page 4

CONTRASTS OF JUSTICE.

The speedy conviction of Butler (says the ban Francisco Chronicle ’), his sentence, and his hanging present some startling contrasts to the case of Durrant. The slayer of Blanche Lamont had been in custody nearly a year and a-half when Butler was arrested, and had, upon the strongest evidence, been convicted of a more atrocious murder than that of Captain Lee Weller, Yet, through process of appeal, he has an indefinite time left him in which to live and plot for his freedom. Butler, on the other hand, was tried and found guilty in three days ; the trial of Durrant took sixty days, after a preliminary detention of 104 days, exclusive of the thirty-eight days used in getting a jury. ° 6

This is British justice—one of the potent causes why murders anywhere in the civilised parts of the British Empire are so few and far between. For the lack of it, the United States had 10,500 murders last year and as there were but 133 legal hangings in the same time, that aggregate will probably be exceeded in the red record of 1897. In the British colonies, as in the United kingdom, the law is construed for the benefit of society rather than the criminal, and there are not too many courts to construe it. The right of appeal is sharply limited, and the dignity of the Bench will not permit techniealities to be used to defeat the ends of justice. We have a precisely opposite system here, and multiplying murders are its natural result. “So far as I am aware,” said the late David Dudley Field in an address to the American Bar Association, “there is no other country calling itself civilised where it is so difficult to convict and punish a criminal, and where it takes so many years to get a final decision between man and man.”

The privilege of appeals in criminals, which is merely an American conception, is to blame for this state of things. It has overburdened the wise statutes originally framed with judgo.made law, and made it difficult for the prosecution to get a jury, to introduce the proper evidence, or to have sentences carried out after they have been imposed. A Butler conviction and execution would be as impossible here as a Durrant delay would be improbable anywhere under the British flag, and this is a statute that ought not to be permitted to remain, less murder become the ordinary settlement of minor grievances and lynch law the only remedy. We need the institution of justice which has given Butler such short shrift, and would do well to borrow it from Australia as we did the ballot law.