Mr. Justice Denman has been passing some very severe sen-
tences on crimes of brutality in the Northern Circuit. For abusing children, two men have been sentenced to seven years' and ten years' penal servitude ; a poacher who committed a savage assault on a policeman who surprised him got ten years ; for• feloniously wounding and stabbing without provocation, another prisoner got eighteen years ; a drunken son who shot his drunken father, and then beat him with the stock of the gun over the head, got eighteen years ; a garotter got fifteen years ; a very bad act of assault, followed by brutal kicking, was punished with seven years' penal servitude. These sentences have been severely attacked, but it is not easy to see how the brutalities which maim, and often kill, are to be checked without sharp sentences, and without impressing offenders with the certainty that crimes which may end in murder will be punished as proxi- mate to murder. Mr. Justice Denman is surely right.
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