24 JANUARY 1931, Page 3

A Ghastly Formality It was known by everybody in advance

that the unhappy woman, Mrs. Wise, who was condemned to death for the crazy murder of her baby, would not be executed. Yet the Judge was required to go through the dreadful formality of sentencing her to death. The sentence was afterwards replaced by a sentence of penal servitude for lifewhich, again, as everybody knows, will not be fully exacted. We are not prejudging the ques- tion whether capital punishment should be abolished or not when we say that it is entirely repugnant to every modern sense of decency that the sentence of death should be passed when it is universally known to be meaningless.

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