Crime & Punishment

New York Daily News Columnist John O'Donnell, who yields to few men in his use of savage political invective, last week turned his pen to a matter far from politics. In the midst of the angry nationwide editorial and public uproar over the kidnaping and murder of six-year-old Bobby Greenlease (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Columnist O'Donnell gave his recommendations for the type of punishment needed to fit the crime. Wrote O'Donnell: "Cruel and unusual punishment [for these criminals], as prolonged as medical skill can accomplish, and as ferocious and merciless as tales of ancient torture can conceive, imposed publicly before all criminals and suspects in Yankee Stadium and brought by TV to every reformatory, jailhouse and parole-board hearing room, might instill [in others] some restraining fear of inevitable punishment.

"The bleeding hearts and do-gooders naturally will come up with sob-sister cries [that this is] inhumane and terrifying punishment . . . To all of which we say nuts . . . Speed of punishment, of course, is important. Not so much so, perhaps, as [its] infliction--publicly, brazenly, and in most terrifying detail."

As an added deterrent to such crimes, where the criminal often turns out to have a long police record, O'Donnell also makes the "serious proposal that any member of a federal, state or county parole board, or any judge who recommends a pardon or commutation of sentence, or any President who springs a federal prisoner or restores citizenship, shall, in the event the convicted criminal commits a crime after his release, be tossed automatically into the jailhouse to serve the same term as that imposed on the criminal he has improperly released."

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