THE PENRUDDOCKE CASE.
NVEhave a permanent dislike of over-criticism of Judges. Such criticism as a rule comes from persons un- qualified in one important particular—perhaps, indeed, the most important particular—to form a true judgment of the merits of the case discussed. The journalists who decide this or that verdict to be unsound, and the people who write letters to the papers denouncing the inequalities of sentences, and wildly repeating that " there is one law for the rich and another for the poor," forget one thing. They have not heard the evidence; they have only read it, which is another matter altogether. They cannot approach the case from the stand- point of the man who with his own ears has heard evidence given,—evidence sometimes inevitably excluded from the columns of a newspaper; who, from a long judicial training, is able to size up the character of a witness and the value of his spoken word ; and who, finally, having punished many men and women, knows, or may be expected to know, some- thing of what the different forms of punishment mean. If those who are loudest in denunciation of this or' that Judge's sen- tence would make an effort to think calmly, instead of obeying the impulse to scream, they might be brought to the reflection that there is probably some reason present to the mind of the Judge who inflicts an apparently lenient sentence, and if as a result there were less immediate outcry against the decisions of persons who must be admitted to have attained the positions they hold by acuteness and common-sense, that would be the better for everybody concerned. We hold this belief strongly, and we are not in the least shaken, but rather confirmed, in it by the result of the case just tried before Mr. Justice Bigham. Mrs. Penruddocke, the wife, of a member of an honoured Wiltshire family, has been found by a jury guilty of wilfully ill-treating one of her children. The evidence of the prosecution showed that for some time past the child had been the victim of petty persecu- tion on the part of her mother; that she had been punished unnecessarily severely, and on certain occasions in a manner not very far removed from torture. The jury accepted that evidence, and found a verdict against Mrs. Penruddocke ; but Mr. Justice Bigham, in passing sentence, said that taking into account all the circumstances of the case, lie should not send Mrs. Penruddocke to prison. He thought that justice would be met by the imposition of a fine of £50. The sentence of a fine, when imprisonment was expected, has been received by a certain portion of the Press with something like a yell, and the usual shower of furious letters has followed. So far as that is a sign that there will always be strong popular feeling in England against a mother guilty of cruelty to her child, it is satisfactory enough. It is perfectly easy, again, to understand that a good deal of surprise should have been excited by the smallness of the fine ; and we, for our part, think that the Judge would have better marked his sense of the callousness of Mrs. Penruddocke's cruelties by imposing a fine of one hundred pounds—the legal maximum. But what has been left out of account almost altogether by Mr. Justice Bigham's critics is the fact that whatever sentence the Judge passed, the real punishment of the guilty person began when the case first came before the Magistrate. The full weight of it fell with the jury's verdict. It is a hideously heavy punishment that crushes the innocent with the guilty. Whatever entry is made in the records of the Central Criminal Court, there is a far more damning record written elsewhere, and it is not only the woman found guilty of cruelty who suffers. There arises, indeed, and there must arise in such cases as this, a greater question for the Judge to consider than the mere question of the amount of cruelty exercised. Ele cannot help asking him- self to what degree circumstances -will aggravate the punish- ment he is bound to inflict; and people who find satisfaction in glibly drawing attention to yet another example of the difference of the law as applied to rich and poor might well try to put themselves in a Judge's position. "Precisely and exactly the same punishment," they urge, "ought to be meted out to Peer and pauper alike." That sounds very well, no doubt, and if matters could be so arranged that every person, rich or poor, found guilty of any par- ticular offence should undergo exactly the same suffering for it afterwards, that would be very satisfactory. But as a fact matters cannot be so arranged. The fishwife of Billings- gate who ill-uses her child, and who in consequence is sent to prison for three months, can take up the thread of her life where she dropped it. She is branded with no very dreadful stigma; possibly she has neighbours who have had much the same experience. Can the rich woman found guilty on the same charge, whether sentenced to imprisonment or not, go back to the life she lived before sentence was passed upon her ? Can she give back to her children what they, too, have lost ? She cannot. It is not hard to imagine a home in which a family has lived for two or three hundred years deserted, perhaps sold out of the family; nor is it difficult to under- stand that the more honoured an English name, the misery of the smudge on it will possibly be the greater. There is a certain class of critic who, calling down vengeance upon the guilty rich man, admits, but sets aside as scarcely worthy of notice, the added circumstance of the depth of his fall. He does not realise how hideously true his own assertion that "there is one law for the rich and another for the poor" may be. There are, it is true, often two laws; but it is the law for the rich that is the more terrible. That is a lesson which only the rich learn ; it is one, however, which people who scream denunciation of a " lenient " sentence should realise is learned with appalling bitterness.
Before we leave a case that from first to last has caused much pain, even to those who have merely had to think and write about it, it may be worth while to draw attention to an aspect of the case which, in the clamorous abuse of Judge and judged, has almost escaped notice. That is the fact that one of the jury impanelled to try the case has written to the
papers expressing astonishment and indignation at the Judge's sentence. We sincerely hope that the practice of jurymen writing to the papers to explain what they wished the Judge to de and why they wished him to do it will not grow, though we are not encouraged in this hope by observing that as a result of comment upon a recent libel action two jurors wrote letters, which were published, pointing out the reasons which led them to assess damages'at a particular figure. It is not the function of jurymen to explain their opinions in writing. A jury exists to hear evidence and to pronounce a verdict. It is the composite mind before whose eye groups of facts are placed in the balances, and it has merely to report to the Judge which of the balances that mind's eye sees go up. When that is done, the business of the jury is done; indi- vidual shades of opinion are not of the slightest consequence. The best parallel to the composite action of a jury and the force which it should exert is that of a firing-party detailed to execute a military prisoner. Not all the rifles are loaded with hall ; the condemned man falls, but it was not any particular individual of the firing-party who killed him ; he was killed by a composite executing force. When that force is dis- banded, each member of it goes about his ordinary soldier's business; he never was an executioner, merely he was a com- ponent part of an impalpable killing machine. Similarly a juror, when once the jury to which he belonged has been dis- charged, is able to express nothing more valuable than the opinion of an ordinary citizen, and deserves, and should be given, no more attention. He has become separate and palpable. As soon as you come to taking the jury to pieces, and getting at each man's opinion in turn, you are on the borderland of bribery. It is the impalpability, the invisibility of the jury which is our sole protection against corruption.
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