Board of Sentences?

The Crime Commission of New York State (Caleb H. Baumes, chairman) has lately wrought upon U. S. penal codes the most signal changes of the decade. The Baumes grading of punishments for repeated felonies, topped off by life imprisonment for a fourth conviction regardless of degree, has been the model for tightened laws in many a state. The theory underlying the Baumes code is that crime is disease, that habitual criminals are chronic patients. Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith of New York appeared before the Baumes commission a fortnight ago and elaborated its theory of crime still further. He made suggestions which, if adopted, will constitute a departure almost as notable in criminology as was the substitution of vaccine for leeches in the treatment of smallpox. Governor Smith proposed that the New York Crime Commission be empowered to: 1) Take away from judges the function of sentencing convicts. 2) Assign that function to a board of specialists--psychiatrists, crime students--whose salaries would be commensurate with the responsibility reposed in them. Governor Smith proposed $25,000 per annum each, the figure to which New York has just raised its chief executive's pay. Psychiatry has become a resort of criminal defense. Sometimes it is invoked falsely, in desperation; sometimes honestly, with justice. Judges invariably require expert advice when scientific evidence is introduced. The Smith plan would require judges to conduct trials, juries to find guilt or innocence, experts to make punishments fit crimes. Designed to promote accuracy, the plan would make for harshness quite as often as for leniency. "The power of the judge to sentence to death has done more than anything else to prevent convictions for murder in the first degree," Governor Smith pointed out. If properly constituted, a sentencing board could attach rehabilitation measures to the penalties it assigned. Its edicts would range from ordering minor surgical operations, and rest cures, to the insane asylum and the electric chair.

The Smith plan advocated no tampering with the power of pardon. "Pardon," said the Governor, "is so plenary a power that it becomes a matter of one man and his conscience. Members of a board, would only be voting, and they would not feel the individual responsibility . . . ."

Said Lawyer Clarence Darrow: "I believe it is the next step . . . . The main thing to be taken into consideration by such a board of correction suggested by Governor Smith would be: can the defendant be saved, be returned to society?"