THE DEATH SENTENCE

Waipawa Mail, Volume LXVI, Issue 99, 27 May 1938, Page 3

THE DEATH SENTENCE

CAMPAIGN FOR A REPRIEVE OPPOSED BY FATHER OF MURDERED GIRL. SYDNEY, Alay 20. A meeting held in Sydney to open a campaign to save a murderer from the gallows was dramatically interrupted by the father of the six-year-old girl who was the murderer’s victim. Alfred Spicer, 65, was sentenced to death in Alarch for the murder of Alarcia Hayes, whom he ravished and then suffocated. The Howard Prison Reform League sponsored the meeting as a protest against the decision to hang 1 Spicer. The girl’s father, Mr E. L. Hayes, a pastrycook, of Windsor, thirty miles from Sydney, was in the back of the hall, and when the chairman of the 'meeting said, ‘ ‘ We have one idea only to-night—to prevent capital punishIment and the hanging of Spicer,” Air Hayes walked quickly to the platform. “What right have you to protest against the hanging of Alfred Spicer? He murdered my little girl,” Hayes shouted. The meeting was thrown into disorder, and there were shouts of “Sit down!” and “We havtf every right!” A police sergeant told Hayes to take a seat, but he walked from the hall greatly agitated. “I came all the way from Windsor to demonstrate against these people who do not want to see justice done,” he said later. “They are inhuman. I am living in constant fear for. my two other children.” The chairman of the Howard prison Reform League, Sir Benjamin Fuller, who did not attend the meeting, is almost certain to be asked to resign. “I am opposed to capital punishment in principle,” he said, “but in extreme cases, such as that of Spicer, it should be carried out.” OFFER TO BE HANGAIAN. One man offered to hang 1 Spicer free of charge and save the Government the cost of paying the official hangman his fee of £5. He was Roy Helme, a returned soldier and father of four young daughters. Deprecating “maudlin sympathy,” he said he would hang Spicer “without a qualm. ’ ’ “I can well appreciate the feelings of Mr Hayes,” said Helme. “He should have the sympathy of the whole of the community. At the war I shot men with sincere regret, but Spicer is one man whom I could kill without the slightest regret. I am personally prepared to do the job, and- it will cost the State nothing. Every father of a small girl in Sydney can say that it was a matter of geography that his daughter was not Spicer’s victim.” Spicer is resigned to his fate. He does not know of the move for his reprive. He is one of the few prisoners in the history of Australian Courts who wanted to plead guilty to a capital charge. He persisted in his plea of guilty against the advice of his counsel, to whom he kept remarking, “I have pleaded guilty; let it go at that.” The hearing was adjourned for a week, and when Spicer again appeared he pleaded not guilty. In his statement from the dock, referring to the crime, he said, “For what I have done I am very sorry. I take 1 turns ’ as the result of my war injuries. I am not then responsible for what I do. From the time I was a small child I had no mother or father and ‘grew up in the gutter.’ ”