TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3147, 26 March 1909, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

| TRAINING OFFICERS. I Four officers of the New Zealand Defence Forces have b?en selected to go to England for a twelve months' training course in the military schools. The proposal is one of the most sensible that the Defence Council has yet approved of, remarks the "Manawatu Standard," and is a decidedly progressive step, which in the course of time may be expected to obviate the necessity tor importing officers from England. With a full and first-hand knowledge of colonial conditions the selected men will be able to assimilate the teachings of the British schools, and apply them to the special requirements of the Dominion. "KILLING NO MURDER." The frequency with which persons guilty of murder in the United States are acquitted is rousing the indignation of the better section of the community. Sarcastic people are writing to the newspapers suggesting the opening of a State bureau for supplying licenses permitting the holders to shoot their unarmed enemies at sight. The sensational Press and the lawyers are blamed for the present deplorable state of affairs. In a recent murder trial in New York the accused himself daily wrote a long description of the proceedings for a New York evening paper. He toll of his hopes and his satisfaction at the evidence, and generally tried to build up a public opinion favourable to himself. Neither the Judge nor the prosecution made any objection. Mote extraordinary still, says the New York correspondent of the "Standard," is the indifferent of lawyers to what in Great Britain are regaidad as legal ethics. Lawyers of national prominence employ methods that would in Great Britain entail instant imprisonment for contempt o£ court, and cause the offender to be' disbarred. A recognised part of the machinery of defence in?,a criminal case is a Press agent, whose business it is to s<*e that stories are published prior to . the trial prejudicing the prosecution as much as possible, and exciting the public's sympathies for the criminal. "No well-equipped firm of legal practitioners of the criminal law seems to be without a 'publicity man,' " says a New YotK paper. "The duty of this person is to create a public opinion for his defendant. As one of the attorneys fjr the accused, the Press agent has access to the defendant at all times, and he prepares adroit and subtle interviews witn the ami°e 1, blackening the name of the dean man, and attempting to prove he is-better dead anri out of the world. The teais of the slayer's children, the sorrows of his old father, and the overwhelming grief of his aged mother are set down with elaborate detail, and reams of copy are supplied to what is known as the 'weeping sisterhood,' who invariably re-write the Press agent's matter as though they had gathered it themselves." Human i nature being what it is, it is quite j impossible for the jurymen in such a case to give an unprejudiced verdict. | The result has been that murderers caught red-handed have been acquitted and cheered as heroes.