Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1923. CODDLING CRIMINALS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2667, 4 December 1923, Page 2

Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1923. CODDLING CRIMINALS.

IN an address on “Crimes and Punishment,” Mr J. \Y. Poyntou, S.M., at a. meeting of' I lie Auekland Justifies of the Peace Association, said criminals were coddled and fussed about by sentimentalists and cranks often as a human pose, but generally in all sincerity and mistakenly. The influence of these meddlers was bad, because if encouraged criminals and influenced Courts to treat them with undue leniency. These remarks did not apply, however, to genuine first-offenders or to those who were really defective. They should get every chance to make good, but to extend the same treatment to hardened and old enemies of society was childish. The last report of the Prison Board showed that. 75 per cent, of those liberated were quickly at their old tricks lignin. Those criminals, who so much sympathy was wasted on, did not desire reform. Capital punishment, said Mr Poyntou, would never be abolished. \Ye might take it out of the hands of the State, but that meant handing ovcrsthe duty to the friends and relatives of the murdered person. Instead of a guilty person being punished, punishment would fall on his innocent relatives, because it was the law of nature that blood must he washed out with blood. The abolition of the death penalty would certainly be succeeded by vendettas, and many more lives would be savagely taken than were at present ended by the Slate. Perjury, he said, was formerly severely punished, an appropriate penalty being commonly to bore the tongue with a red hot iron. Although perjury was very rife in our Courts, it had always been so, and there was no reason to become hysterical about it. If was a mistake to have it exclusively an indictable offence. If it were punishable summarily by fine or a short term of imprisonment there would be much less of it. The vindictive perjurer who lied on oath to injure another was rare.