FEMALE MURDERERS privilege of choking the woman to death before igniting the wood. Among the Scan dinavians and Teutons, grave criminality on the part of women seems to have been of rare occurrence, but no mercy was shown the adul teress or the murderess. In India, husbandpoisoning became so frequent a practice that it was thought necessary to formulate a law that; no widow should survive her husband, hence the custom of burning the wife on the funeral pyre of her spouse. It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that Asiatic codes in general have never shown any favor to female assassins. It is apparent that the prejudice against the execution of women guilty of murder is a comparatively modern sentiment, and, it may be said, is even now, with one excep tion, strongly exhibited only in the United States and in the Latin countries of Europe and South America. That the prejudice against the hanging of female murderers is most strongly felt among peoples of Latin origin, is probably due, in part, to the fact that it was among the Romanic races that originated the sentimental adoration of women as a sex, a sentimentality which had its origin in events closely identified with the spirit which gave rise to adoration ofjthe Virgin Mary. Thus we find that in most of the Latin countries where the death penalty is still applied at all, it is tacitly understood that sentences of death pro nounced upon women will be commuted to imprisonment for not more than twenty years. In the South American republics the J fiction of "life imprisonment" is no longer maintained. In Italy, San Marino, Portugal, and Roumania, neither men nor women are subject to the death penalty. Of Latin nations in Europe, France and Spain only have retained the death penalty for women. In both countries the capital crimes are: treason, murder, setting fire to an' inhabited edifice, and infanticide. As a matter of fact, however, the execution of a woman in either of these countries is of very rare occurrence; for instance, of the 1,376
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women brought to trial for infanticide in France during the decade 1891-1900, not one received sentence of death. During the same period nearly one hundred women were tried for homicide by poisoning, and of those convicted two only were sentenced to the guillotine, and it is well understood that neither of these sentences will ever be carried into effect. The fact that the salary of "Monsieur Paris" (the public hangman) was erased by the budget com mittee, in taking up the estimates for 1907, points to the early abolition of capital pun ishment in France for both sexes. In Spain the death penalty has been gradually dying out since 1867. In 1895, of the culprits sentenced to death, 93 per cent were finally pardoned, that is, their sentences were commuted to penal servi tude. Although the law of Spain prescribes the death penalty even for infanticide, the unwritten code is that the garrote shall never be brought into requisition in the case of infanticide when committed to hide the mother's shame. Of the thirty-two women sentenced to death for infanticide in 1900, not one has been executed. Even in aggra vated cases of premeditated murder, sen tences of death passed upon women are almost always commuted to a term of im prisonment, only twenty-two sentences of death passed upon females having been carried out since 1867. Capital sentences are executed in Spain "behind prison walls," according to the code; but the garrote is raised so high upon a platform within the prison yard that the performance can be viewed by spectators outside. In the Latin-American republics, with a few exceptions, the death penalty has either been abolished by statute or is never applied, excepting under martial law. The criminal code of Argentina provides the death pen alty for treason and murder in the first degree, but the execution of a woman is prohibited both by law and by public senti ment. In Mexico the death penalty, wher ever legalized, applies to both men and
