Crime and Punishment.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20106, 9 December 1930, Page 10

Crime and Punishment.

A young man who had driven his motor-cycle at a dangerous speed, without lights, and with a noisy exhaust, appeared before a Christcliureh Magistrate yesterday and was told that he " ought to be sentenced to be hanged." Then he was fined £2 and costs for one offence, and 30s and costs for another. Some will think that they understand now why the quality of mercy is not strained; it is so exceedingly supple 'that no stretch is too long for it, and it works as fast as a man can talk. In the interval between one sentence and the next, it can leap the distance between taking a man's life away from him and taking seventy shillings of his money. Others will wonder whether they ought not to begin working out & new theory of the

value of life, on the basis of this judicial hint. If hanging is one mark on the •.=calc, and three pounds toil (and costs) ■s the next lower, to which his Worship, .Mr A, or his Worship, Mr B, will rebut from the judgment he " ought " to pass, then a life is worth something more than three pounds ten. It is not easy to tell how much more, because of the costs. But there is another line of reflection that may. be followed. If people who motor-cycles too fast and too explosively ought to be sentenced to be hanged, then what is to be done with the even less respectable p?oj)ie who rob banks, set fire to haystacks, cleverly plunder the widow and orphan, put powdered glass in their rich relative's arrowroot, and systematically give short weight? At first glance it seems as if nothing will do but to reintroduce the more painful and protracted variants, like the wheel or burning at the stake, with graduated preliminary doses of the humbscrew, the rack, and the boot. But this would be unnecessarily elaborate and expensive. There is old and excellent precedent for treating all offenders alike, whose offence is worse than a trivial social slip. All of these possibilities are so interesting that nobody, it is to be hoped, will attack them with the blunt instrument of a commonplace explanation or go beyond tbem to enquire why Magistrates like to lift thunderbolts that they cannot 'i.'vrow.