, United States (USA) (American Colonies)
1905 - Whipping Post for Wife Beaters

President Roosevelt's suggestion, in his recent Congressional message, that "some form of corporal punishment" is desirable in dealing with wife-beaters and other "offenders whose criminality takes the shape of brutality and cruelty toward the weak," has led to efforts to establish a whipping-post in the District of Columbia, and to some discussion in the press of the country at large. The Chicago "Evening Post" favors the proposal on the ground that "no man who beats his wife is anything short of a brute and a coward, and for such the infliction of physical pain seems to be the only punishment that tends to put a check on his brutality." The same paper says further:

"The law that merely fines or imprisons the wife-beater most often gives the severest punishment to innocent victims of the man's brutality. And it seldom punishes the brute as he should be punished. From this viewpoint it it is not surprising to find those usually arrayed against the administration of harsh and degrading penalties strongly favoring the whipping-post for that most brutal offense, the beating of wives."

The Albany "Law Journal" takes and opposite view:
"It is bad enough for a man to beat his wife. It is still worse for the State to beat him for it. The sheriff whipped a man brutally and publicly the other day in Maryland. This sort of punishment degrades the sufferer beyond remedy: it makes him revengeful; he will always ache to kill that sheriff; and we do not wonder. It tends to make a brute of the officer inflicting it. A self-respecting man ought to decline to dirty his hands with it. In old times they used to keep butchers off the juries in England, from the popular notion that they were bloodthirsty, a mistaken notion, probably. But we do believe that the custom of requiring a public officer to whip his fellow beings until they bleed and faint, and sometimes till they come near dying, is very reprehensible. If we must whip criminals, let us have a machine for doing int, like a carpet-beater." - "Literary Digest."

The Argus
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
January 21, 1905

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