CRIME PROBLEMS

Timaru Herald, Volume CLI, Issue 22201, 19 February 1942, Page 8

CRIME PROBLEMS

The Death Penalty Two Schools Of Thought (P.A.) AUCKLAND, Feb. 12. The opinion that the Government might perhaps have been too hasty in New Zealand in deciding that there should be no death penalty for some classes of murder was expressed by Mr A. K. North in an address to the Rotary Club on “Changing Views on Punishment, for Crime.” Mr North pointed out that murders varied greatly in their type, and said he thought there was much to bo -said for the view that there ought, to be a death penalty for murder where a man had simply killed brutally, without thought and without provocation. The difficulty would be to decide which cases would fall in one class and which in the other. “I agree,” said Mr North, “that if you are letting off nine out of ten for murder you had better let the lot off.” Mr North said the subject was one on which the average citizen had quite definite views. In the recent controversy on the abolition of the death penalty and of flogging, people fell into two camps, those who believed that both forms of punishment should be abolished, and those who felt that the step taken was too rapid and that the total abolition of flogging was not desirable. At least it would appear that the abolition of the death penalty would result in persons engaged in serious crime being less hesitant to commit murder. To illustrate the great advance that had been made in the treatment of crime since a little over 100 years ago, Mr North quoted several typical English cases. At that period a little girl eight years of age. undefended, after a trial lasting eight minutes for the theft of 5/-, was sentenced to death and hanged. A man was sentenced to transportation for poaching, and his wife in the hope of sharing his exile committed a similar offence. She, too. was sentenced to transoortation, but when tlfe judge learned her motive he ordered her to be hanged. There was no evidence that the death penalty substantially reduced the number of minor offences for which it was inflicted. From 1837 it came to be recognised that in the treatment of a criminal some method of reforming him ought to be taken into account. The speaker reviewed the humane working of the penal system in New Zealand to-day. with its sympathetic consideration and treatment of individual cases. He said it was utterly wrong that flogging should have been applicable to feeble-minded persons or in certain types of sexual cases.