Genre:

Regular Feature, Editorial, News-Commentary

Subjects:

Crime, Mental Illness, Heredity

    Reports that although the 'sensational nature' of Frederick B Deeming's crimes 'was by no means calculated to conduce to a calm and dispassionate consideration of the case urged by his counsel', even 'in Melbourne, by this time, there is probably an uneasy conviction that the man was more or less a homicidal lunatic. His counsel's plea of instinctive and hereditary criminality seems to have been only too well justified by the facts, and in a more scientific age the hanging of Deeming may become the stock illustration of the judicial crimes of an unscientific age' (546).