A SEVERE SENTENCE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 12446, 1 September 1902, Page 4

A SEVERE SENTENCE.

There will, we fancy, ibe a fairly general i consensus of opinion throughout the. colony that the sentence passed by Mr Justice Edwards last week on tho stupid*man. Moore, who sent a couple of, threatening letters to ,the Acfcing-Pre-mier, was an unnecessarily severe one.' Mr Justice Edwards himself said in passing sentence that he assumed that the ■ prisoner had had no intention of carrying out his threats. Hardly any . able man can doubt that this assumption wan well founded. And if Moore's letters were merely meaningless vapouring.? it i» surely not to be pretended l that his indiscretion would not have been adequately punished by a much lighter sentence than that of three years'" im- ' prisonment, which was imposed upon , him. He seems, indeed, to be a, clis- ; tinctly harmless creature and not by ; any means the sort of individual from whom a public man might be expected to fear any harm. If ho had been a dangerous person the sentence that has . ■ been passed upon, him would not have excited any.,special comment. It would.' have been freely acknowledged that, such; > a punishment was necessary 'as would clearly show that the act of sending threatening letters to public men,! with - a view to their intiroidntian, constitutes an offence that is not to be committed' with impunity. The perscm from whom . violence is t-o be apprehended does not usually, however, extend to his enemy the courtesy of informing him before- • hand, in a letter oyer his own signature, of the .design he has formed. Moore's whole conduct was that of an eccentric— as the evidence of the medical men Who examined him went to show he is—rather, than that of a criminal. Under the cir- , cmnstances the sentence of three years' imprisonment which has been recorded against him must strike the community as excessive. Sir Joseph Ward himself, the recipient of the man's letters, who will, we may feel sure, have been the last to wish Moore unduly punished, was ; probably the first* to see that the sen-? tence went far beyond what the circumstances of the case demanded, and we> have little doubt that his usual good sense will prevail in the Cabinet to the ' extent of having the sentence remitted to a term that will be less incommensurate with the silly offence of which the prisoner was guilty.