Page:New penal code of Siam (Masao T, 1908).pdf/11

 offender who has committed ten offences at different times and places is not necessarily ten times the criminality of him who has committed only one offence and that if the State had exercised sufficient vigilance to catch and punish him when he had committed his first offence he might have been prevented from committing his nine other offences. The simple and practical English system of visiting each offence with punishment is one that commends itself far better to common sense. The new Penal Code of Siam is distinctly English in this respect. Of course, the English system of visiting each offence with punishment does not mean that where a person violates several provisions of the law by one and the same act he is to be punished separately for each violation of the law, nor does it mean that where a person commits an offence which is composed of many parts, any of which constitutes a separate offence, he is to be punished separately for each of those many parts. For if it did, what would be the result? A man who gives another man a hundred strokes with a stick, would, at the rate of, let us say one year for each blow, get one hundred years for the whole beating! The English system is sufficiently guarded against such absurdities and so is the system as adopted in the new Penal Code of Siam.

This is a question of very practical importance. Suppose a man is sentenced to imprisonment for a month. It is a question of absorbing interest to him to know when that sentence begins to run and when it ends: whether imprisonment for a month means imprisonment for one calendar month, in which case it makes a difference of three days whether he is imprisoned in February or in March, or whether it means imprisonment for thirty days, in which case it makes no difference whether he is imprisoned in February or in March or in any other month: whether the first day of imprisonment is counted, and, if so, whether it counts for one full day or for any fraction thereof: whether the last day of imprisonment is counted and, if so, whether it counts for one full day or for any fraction thereof: whether both the first and last days of imprisonment are counted or whether either the first or last day only is counted: whether