REPRIEVED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 229, 26 September 1940, Page 6

REPRIEVED.

The Government took an unconscionable time to make up its mind about the case of Douglas Henry Cartman, and finally made a decision which will arouse in the community feelings of anger and contempt. Let the circumstances of the crime be recalled: Cartman, driving a car, knocked down a woman and a boy on a dark road. The b6y was killed, the woman so badly injured that she would probably have died in a day or two, though according to medical opinion she was not unconscious. Cartman dragged her and the body of the dead boy into his car, drove some distance, and then rolled the boy's body down a bank. The woman fell out, but he dragged her back into the car, and drove further. Then he removed her from the car, and hit

her more, than once on the head with a tyre lever. He left her practically naked, and, in the words of the Crown Prosecutor, there was the strongest suggestion of sexual outrage. This was the evidence on which the jury returned a. verdict of murder, a verdict with which the trial judge agreed. No crime more foul than this has ever been brought to light in the Dominion. By comparison with it, many murders for which men have paid the supreme penalty, were minor crimes, and clean. Yet the Government, hag-ridden by a political plank adopted long before they came to power and responsibility, < has decided that this murderer's life must be spared. It has never had the courage to abolish capital punishment by amending the law; it prefers to countenance the repetition of the solemn farce of sentencing a man to death, when the man himself, the jury that has found him guilty and the judge who dons th<j_ black cap, all know that the sentence will not be executed. In the case of Cartman * statement is issued that "it is understood " the man is of " less than normal mentality, though he could not be regarded as insane." Considered in the light of the fact that the jury was assured that the prisoner was aware of the quality of his acts, this statement bears the appearance of a weak, face-saving apology. The death sentence has been commuted to "imprisonment for life"—which is another fiction. Other murderers nominally sentenced to life imprisonment have been released after a few years, and released by this Government. There is a possibility, unless public opinion asserts itself, that after the lapse of years, when the original circumstances have been forgotten, this man also will have his case " reviewed" and that he will be released. One safeguard, not absolute, but useful, should be insisted on. His papers should be marked, for the guidance of future Governments, " never to be released."