The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle. — 1870-04-16 (Stourbridge, West Midlands, England)

SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1870.  THE HOME SECRETARY AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.  The Home Secretary has perhaps as arduous duties as any member of the Government, but devotion to the responsibilities of the position and determined work can accomplish all that has to be done. In one respect, however, successive Home Secretaries must feel that a responsibility is thrown upon them which no one man ought to have. We allude to the Home Office being virtually constituted a Court of Criminal Appeal. Our criminal jurisprudence is certainly not complete without sach a court. It is a great anomaly that in civil cases, involving questions of property or of personal claims, there should be an appeal to the House of Lords, but that in cases of life and death there should be no such appeal. The Secretary of State assumes this position, or rather it is thrust upon him as one of the contingencies of his office, but beyond doubt no one holding this position does so voluntarily. The responsibility is too great for one man, however conscientious and however well informed he may be with regard to the painful facts which from time to time are placed before him. Mr. Bruce has had a great deal to contend against in regard to the dread penalty of death since he came into office. His decisions have been called into question perhaps More than those of any previous Home Secretary. On the justice of these decisions we will not enter, but we may retuara that the Home Secretary's vex. diets, we believe, have been disputed, rather owing to the growing feeling that his jurisdie. lion is anomalous and uncertain, thau on any special doubt of his desire to do justice or of the soundness of his judgment. The last case which has given rise to argument is that of Rutterford, sentenced to death for as cruel and deliberate a murder as was perhaps ever perpetrated. A very curious question arose with regard , to this convict. He had been SO severely burnt ' du his youth that his head was in one part so joined to his body that in that part he really had no neck. Now he was sentenced "to be hanged by the neck till he was dead.- Objection was taken that this could not be done without indicting prolonged suffering which was never contemplated, and the possibility of not being able to kill the man at all in this way was doubted. After numerous examinations and consultations it was decided that at any rate awfully prolonged suffering would result, and as our law permits of no other way of judicially putting a man to death Mr. Bruce has reprieved the convict, who will he subjected to penal servitude for tile. Now this is certainly SO extraordinary reason for saving a man's life who is judicially condemned to die. It may lie a very good reason for not hanging him if were to be tender of the feeling of is condemned criminal, but it certainly is not a good reason for sparing his life as viewed relatively to other criminals, who may he said to have been executed because they hail net any malformation of the neck. The whole case, in fact, adds another to the many anomalies and contradictions of death by the law. We sentence all murderers to death, but eomparatively few are executed. Women, as a rule, are never hanged, though there are at rare intervals some exceptions; but why one sex should be spared more than the other no one can say. Some men are spared simply because agitation is got up for their reprieve, while others are executed because they have no friends; and now we have a man reprieved not on any moral grounds, not for anything whatever connected with his crime, but simply owing to an accident producing physical malformation. The case of Itutterford is without parallel, and is scarcely likely to prove a precedent, but it increases the s n and arbitrary tnicertainties of Home 06.'0 piris Hello'', and indirectly it will on nitwit towarile relicviag the HOMO Secretary of duties that he never • aglit to have to perform, and towards the formatien of a properly constituted Court of Criminal Appeal.