CRIMES OF PASSION

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 2305, 25 November 1925, Page 14

CRIMES OF PASSION

No aspect of our national life has inspired a more justifiable pride In | British citizens than the admlnlstra- 1 ton of our crminal laws. Its superiority j to Continental systems lies largely in tho fact that It has never permitted tho course of justice to bo deflected by the pernicious doctrine that sexual emotion Is a valid excuse of murder. In Latin countries, and notably in France, the idea that crimes of passion should be judged with an indulgence not accorded to other crimes, is carried to such a point that tho acquittal of a murderer who alleges unrequited love or jealousy as a motive is almost a foregone conclusion, especially when the assassin has a youthful and attractive personality. What is the effect of this misplaced leniency? A glance at the statistics of crime shows that in 1921 there wore 585 murders in France as against G 3 in England and Wales. Although women do occasionally maim and kill men who have deserted them, the immense majority of crimes of passion are committed by men against women. Tho common sense so characteristic of our raoo, and the respect for women upon which our social life is based, are entirely at variance with the idea that an unwritten law gives a husband or a lover a sort of romantic right to kill his wife or sweetheart because ho suspects her of infidelity, or because she refuses to listen to his suit. Such may be the law of tho jungle, but it finds no sanction either In Christianity or in clvilisaton. Do these women, who during recent trials have manifested hysterical sympathy for murderers, but apparently none for their victims, realise whnt the placing of crimes of passion "in a distinct category from other murders” would mean to their sex? Apart from the fact that it would inevitably expose them to dangers from which fear of tho gallon's has hitherto saved them, such a modification of,the law would lower the whole status of womanhood in this country,

The majority of women are, I firmly believe, too sensible to be affected by this morbid plty-the-poor-mnrdcrcr sentimentallay. Thlse who succumb to it do so, I think, because they confuse tho emotion which sometimes leads to murder with love. But crimes of passion are never, can never, be inspired by real love. Love is the very antithesis of the savage sensuality from which the impuse to kill is born.

The main purpose of all law, and more especially of our laws, is to protect the weak against abuse by the strong. Physically speaking women are, and always will be weaker than men. They would, therefore, be the principal sufferers if dabblers in the new phychology were permitted to interfere with the course of justice on the grounds that crimes of violence are the result of a “murder complex” for which the criminial is not responsible.