HABITUAL CRIMINALS

Evening Star, Issue 20137, 30 March 1929, Page 16

HABITUAL CRIMINALS

MAY BE BRANDED Tlio French police _ are said to be studying a new scientific method of indelibly marking habitual criminals, like the ancient branding of a flour de lys, with a red-hot iron. It consists (writes a Paris correspondent of tlio London ‘Times’) of injecting solidified paraffin under the skin to form visible and permanent lumps, the latter being of different shapes and in different categories of law-breakers —for example, lumps on the right shoulders for burglars, on the left shoulder for pickpockets, and so on. French medical men say that the paraffin could be injected into the body in such a way that it could never be removed. The chief advantage of this method, apart from establishing a man as a criminal, is that it would be humane. The lump would scarcely be noticeable, and only the police would have the key to load its meaning. The last famous woman to be branded was an adventuress named Countess do la Motte, who in 1786 made Cardinal do Rohan believe that Queen Marie Antoinette wanted a certain diamond necklace, recently arrived at Paris, that was priced at £200,000. He bought it in order to gain her political support, and handed it over to a veiled lady, supposed to bo the Queen, whom lie met in the park at Versailles one dark night. The veiled lady was really the countess, who wanted the necklace for herself. When the scandal leaked out “ the necklace affair ” was one of the most sensational cases in French history—the cardinal was thrown into the Bastille, and later acquitted by Parliament, but Countess do la Motto was branded on her breast.