The mignonette Tragedy.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 80, 13 December 1884, Page 6

The mignonette Tragedy.

Those apologists for crime who tried hard to justify the action of the captain and mate at the yacht Mignonette, and laboured to show that the killing of the poor boy Parker Teas not murder, -will receive a shock on learning that the Special Court has re* turned a verdict of "Wilful Murder" against the two chief actors in the painful tragedy. It is hard to see how any other termination could have been reached in trying the case. Though popular phrase has it that "Necessity has no law, the legal authorities declare with greater force that in this instance Law knows no necessity. As the plea of hunger is no defence to a charge of larceny, much less can the same plea be accepted in justification of murder. According to the "Law Times," ordinary necessity in English law means compulsion by threats of life and limb. This can be brought down to a very slender point, but no amount of casuistry can bring the deliberate murder of a helpless fellow-being within the definition. There is authority in the law books for saying that if two drowning men grasp a plank which will only support one, it is not homicide for one to push the other off. This is looked upon as a sort of act of self-defence, and is as far as the law goes in admitting the plea of necessity. When we leave the legal and come to the moral aspect of the question, there is more scope for hair-splitting and greater difficulty in adjudging the degree of guilt attaching to the slayers of the lad. That the actual necessity was great, though legal necessity was absent, no one doubts. Cannibalism is so repugnant to civilised ideas that a resort to it is presumptive evidence of the direst need ; and it is from this standpoint that sympathy has been evoked for the captain and mate of the wrecked yacht, who only escaped the perils of the deep to be carefully nurtured and preserved in life to stand their trial for murder. Casuistry can justify their deed on the pleas that it was essential to the preservation of their own lives, that it was desirable that one rather than four should perish, and that the unfortunate youth sacrificed was the least likely to survive. The argument can be logically pressed, and the contention urged that these four men in the boat on the lone ocean constituted a complete society for the timebeing.and that they did not exceed the right of society to decree the death of any individual member. As in the case of a legal executioner, the slayers of the lad were actuated by no malice, but took his life judicially and as humanely as possible. But after all has been said, the fact remains that the act was one which no civilised community could pronounce righteous or proper, and which no British Court of Justice could have condoned. As a matter of course, the two guilty men will be sentenced to death, and probably.in deference to popular sympathy, they will afterwards have the extreme law penalty committed for a more or less extended term of imprisonment.