The Calcutta Weekly Notes and Notes of Cases of the Calcutta High Court and of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the English Law Courts Monday February 13 1922

The deterrent mode of punishment is based on the propriety and feasibility of operating on the criminal will of a person and of preventing the existence of such will by furnishing suffcient motives to counteract the temptations to crime by making the crime more an object of dread than an object of desire and the represive motives stronger than the seductive. [...] The advocates of the theory of the criminal’s reformation rspect the human being in the criminal and refuse to use him merely as a means for the preservation of the State and therefore accept punishment for the crime not so much with a view to deter persons from its commission as to preserve the criminal from a relapse. [...] This mode found special favour with the Chnrch the chief punishment of which in the Middle Ages was penitence with a view to the improvement of the crimnal ; the Canon Law making the improvment the principal object of the punishment. [...] The general question of the applicability of the Common Law to India is adverted to in the judgment but in the view the Court took of the express. [...] In any view of the matter a state of the law which whenever a question of fundamental imporance not clearly provided for by statute is in issue entails references to the English Comon Law on the chance of the Court being iduced to apply it in the special circumstances of the case cannot be regarded as satisfactory in the domain at any rate of public law which in India has a great d