SERVE HIM RIGHT!

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 21 August 1919, Page 4

SERVE HIM RIGHT!

There is no sympathy expressed in this city for Roy Delaney, the ruffian who brutally outraged the little nine-year old girl at Petone recently, and who has been awarded 15 years' penal servitude and 10 lashes with the "cat." The punishment is a terrible one. But it fits the crime. Delaney, a young man twenty three years of age, is a returned soldier ' with a good military record. But, as the judge pointed out at the trial, it would be ridiculous to claim that because this man has fought for his country and acquitted himself well, he is therefore justified in behaving as he has. My Wellington correspondent, writing in reference to this case, says: It is well for Roy Delaney that the Petone people didn't get hold of him before he was nabbed. They'd have lynched him —sure ! As it was a party of Petone boys, burning with- indignation, surrounded the lock-up and wanted the authorities to give up the guilty man, and the police had some difficulty in persuading them to disperse. I have been present (in Australia) at a flogging, and have no desire to repeat the experience. When the brawny-armed warder who administered., the punishment had done with the flogged man his back resembled a raw beef-steak. The goal doctor stood by lest symptoms of heart-failure should manifest themselves. Fortunately they did not. But the whipped man was more dead than alive when it was all over. Judge Stringer announces that lie will order flogging in all future cases of this kind, and this frightful punishment will probably do much to put down these offences.