DEATH PENALTY

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 April 1924, Page 6

DEATH PENALTY

HANGING MOST FEARED.

" LONDON, March 27. Lord Darling, formerly Mr. Justice Darling, in an article in the London Evening News, commenting on the proposals to abolish the death sentence made by various public bodies says he considers that greater certainty of retribution in ordinary crimes is more useful than the mere severity of tlie punishment, and points out that poisoning in Henry the Eighth’s reign was punishable by death by boiling. “There is one incontrovertible difference between death and ail other forms of punishment,” he continues. “It is final and irrevocable, and also cheap. Roasting was long reserved as more dignified, and strictly appropriate to those whose opinions were considered too broad or too narrow. Similarly beheading was always held to be more genteel than hanging. “I cannot agree that a life sentence is equally as 1 effective a deterrent as hanging. Imprisonment holds no unknown terrors, but who, in meditating a murder could fail to experience that ‘dread of something after death?’ Prison may be tolerable to those who do not fear the modern courses of lectures delivered to convicts in British penitentiaries.

“I am convinced that the death sentence, as now guarded by the Appeal Court and the Home Secretary’s intervention, is a justifiable punishment. If it is abolished there will be an end to those absurd pleas of insanity, which like the alibi, are as good a defence to a charge of pocketpicking as they could be to one of cold-blooded shooting; and an alienist would be retained only when the game was worth the candle.”