THE AMERICAN WAY

Waikato Independent, Volume XXXVII, Issue 3272, 27 February 1937, Page 7

THE AMERICAN WAY

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

SOME APPROPRIATE EXAMPLES. Magistrates and Judges, particularly in America, are very fond of trying to fit the punishment to the crime, and a recent action of the New York magistrate in sentencing a man to take his wife to a cinema and hold her hand all through the performance is not alone in its peculiar glory (says the Manchester Guardian). Five or six years ago a Brooklyn Court authority sentenced a wife-beater to kiss his wife every morning for six months. This punishment, on the face of it, seems to fit the crime, but one would rather like to have heard what the wife thought about it. A Judge at Logan, Ohio, once found a man guilty of perjury, and ordered him to read the commandment: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" and also St. Matthew, chapter xix, verse 18, every Sunday for two years. Another legal Solomon, imprisoning a drunkard, imposed a condition that he must drink a certain large amount of water every day, which, if superficially just, was a strange method of putting him off beer. But there was nothing but sound sense in the judgment of Mr Jonah J. Goldstein, of the Yorkville Court, who in 1933 severely lectured fifteen men who had been found dropping newspapers in Central Park, New York, and ordered them to proceed to the park in charge of a policeman and spend an hour picking up the litter other folk had spilt. The alternative was a five-dollar fine; but the whole fifteen, to their credit, chose the littergathering.