CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.

Evening Star, Issue 12763, 16 March 1906, Page 3

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.

The State of Ohio Senate recently passed a Bill abolishing capital punishment for murder in the first degree, except in the case of a second offence. In taking tnis step Ohio is following the example set by Maine and Wisconsin. Ohio has hitherto shared with a baker’s dozen of the other States the distinction of having inflicted the punishment of death for murder alone, on the principle of the old Mosaic law, “An ey© for an eye,” etc. The majority of the States are a good deal more Draconian in their legislation. Quite half of them condemn the traitor to death; a slightly less number make the man found guilty of rape pay for it with his life. This Is especially the case in those States wher negroes abound—Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Carolina. A number of the States make death the penalty for arson, Indiana limiting it to cases where death rpsalls from the arson. California and North Carolina extend the dreaded penalty to two crimes, the first of which certainly seems to deserve the utmost rigor of the law. Train-wrecking Is punished with death in the Pacific State, burglary' in the Atlantic. Hitherto Ohio, like New York, has executed its criminals by electrocution, a current of electricity being passed through the body till death results. The execution is carried out privately, and no coroners inquest is held. Some objection has been token to it on the ground that it is a “ cruel and unusual punishment,” and therefore unconstitutional. Ibis consideration may possibly have weighed with the Ohio Senate. The usual objections to the death peuuity are that it does not give time for repentance, that the murderer is often of a direared mind, that it is not really a deterrent, that it increases the risk of injustice to innocent people, and that punishment ought to reform, not punish. On the other hand, there are not a few thinkers who would execute habitual criminals, and not give them, as Charles Kingsley says, “the finest air rn England and ■ the right to kill two gaolers a week.”