LENIENCY FOR MURDERER.

Evening Star, Issue 23696, 2 October 1940, Page 6

LENIENCY FOR MURDERER.

It is hardly surprising that the decision of the Executive Council to commute the death sentence pronounced on the Waikino murderer, Cartman, should be the subject of widespread criticism. The circumstances of this crime are both disgusting and horrifying, and the general public is likely to suffer from rather more than a vague uneasiness over the fact that a human being capable of committing such an offence should be allowed to escape the full penalty. It may be argued by people with pacifist leanings towards the punishment of crime that anything like a clamour for the taking of even a murderer’s life is unseemly and not in keeping with modern methods of handling such cases. But too often the grievous harm that a killer has done is forgotten in the concentration that is subsequently given in court proceedings and in discussions concerning the fate of the malefactor. Not only the present has to be considered, but also the past and the future. Society has every right to any protection the law can give it from the menace of the hand that does not hesitate to strike with mortal effect. It has yet to' be proved that capital punishment has lost its value as a powerful deterrent. Unfortunately, there are in almost any large community some individuals who have no fear of prison life, particularly perhaps under the improving conditions under which it is governed, and who, animal-like, seem content to exist on three sure meals a day, a bed, and the company at certain times of men possessing a more or less similar mentality.

In civil life wo have progressed far enough to know that thieving or highway robbery, or forgery docs not merit death, and in such cases as those few people will cavil at the softening of the State’s desire for retribution. What constitutes a proper punishment for a capital offence, however, cannot be estimated on parallel lines. There is all the difference between life and death. In 1766 Oliver Goldsmith wrote with a conviction that holds good to-day: “I cannot question the right of social combinations to demand capital punishment in cases of murder. Their right is obvious, as it is the duty of us all, from the laws of self-defence, to cut off that man who has shown a disregard for the life of another. Against such all Nature rises in arms; but it is not so against him who steals my property.” Every point in favour of capital punishment boils down to the one potent fact that it is a necessity, deplorable perhaps, but still a practical necessity. The leniency shown to Cartman. who has not been proclaimed legally insane, has come as something of a shock to the people of Now Zealand. Hitherto they have not been

made officially aware that commutation of the death sentence has been, without exception, part of the Government’s policy. The general fooling left as an aftermath of the whole wretched tragedy is that the kind of justice which should serve as protection to lawabiding citizens is not to be carried out. Almost as if in sinister celebration of the verdict of the Executive Council, another murderer of the brutal type is numbered among the criminals who broke out from prison in Auckland last night, leaving three injured warders behind them as evidence of the lengths to which unsocial persons will go to achieve their ends. The world at large has surely had a surfeit of pacifism and appeasement in all their dangerous forms and ramifications.