§ SIR H. COTTON (Nottingham, E.)I beg to ask the Under-Secretary of State for India whether he is aware of the facts in a Bengal case where there was a dispute about fishery rights, and certain respectable peasants, over forty in number, and varying in age from forty-five to twenty years, were convicted of theft of fish, and were all of them sentenced to the punishment of whipping, which sentence was immediately carried into effect, and an appeal was then preferred and the orders of the lower Court were set aside though the men had already been flogged; and whether, having regard to this and other cases which are on record, the Secretary of State will reconsider his decision not to introduce a clause into the Indian Whipping Act Amendment Bill which shall prevent the infliction of whipping, when an appeal has been preferred, until after the sentence has been confirmed by the superior Court.
§ MR. BUCHANANThe case to which I understand the hon. Member to refer occurred more than twenty years ago, and I would point out that the conviction was set aside, not because the accused had not taken the fish, but because their action in taking them did not, under the law as it then stood, come within the strict legal definition of theft. The magistrate who passed the sentence of whipping was severely censured, and it does not appear to the Secretary of State that the occurrence of a case of this kind indicates such a likelihood of miscarriage of justice as to make it desirable to allow appeals against sentences of whipping in face of the strong objection referred to in my Answer to the hon. Member's Question on this subject on the 28th April. The Secretary of State is advised that such an offence is 45 clearly not punishable with whipping under the new Bill.