or accomplices to a case are in the custody of another jurisdiction, official requisition for their appearance shall at once be made to the latter, although the respective jurisdictions are entirely independent of each other, and such requisition shall in general be complied with within a prescribed period. If the trial of such accessories has already commenced within the jurisdiction to which they belonged, before such aforesaid requisition has been made, it is provided that the prisoner charged with the lesser offence shall be removed to the court in which the prisoners charged with graver offences are under trial: or, if the offences are of equal gravity, the few shall be transferred to the court which has within its jurisdiction the greater number: or, if the numbers are equal, the prisoners last accused shall be removed to the jurisdiction in which the first accusation was made.

If the distance between the jurisdictions exceed 300 li, it is however provided that each charge shall be examined and determined separately.

Treatment of other parties to a case where one party is still at large. Where one of the parties to a case is still at large, and the chief

blame is thrown upon him by those who have fallen into the hands of justice, if there is sufficient evidence to straightway bear out the statements of the parties, they will forthwith be either punished as accessories or released, as the case may be. On the other hand, if, as is usually the case, no such evidence is forthcoming, the several sentences are not immediately carried out, but they are detained in prison pending his arrest, lest, when the case is finally disposed of, it should prove that they, and not he, should properly have been condemned as principals. As, however, it would be unfair to detain them for ever, it is in general the rule that they may be disposed of after three years, if their sentence be bambooing merely, after five years if their sentence be transportation for life. The date from which the imprisonment commences is calculated from the date of confirmation of the sentence, and not from the date of arrest, and, in some cases, where sentence is deferred, a man is left to languish for twenty years, before he can claim to be sent to transportation, or if he has, as usual fallen in, meanwhile, with Acts of Grace and General Gaol Deliveries, before

he can be set free. In the case of joint larceny, and no matter whether the sentence be deferred or not, the rule is that not less than twenty years must pass before the sentence can be carried out.

In capital cases, execution is not necessarily deferred even though a man may thereby escape decapitation and mutilation, but a capital sentence for joint larceny (supra) will be postponed twenty years and, if need be, longer.

COMMISSION OF SEVERAL OFFENCES

Where an offender is convicted of two (or more) offences at the same time, he is sentenced on the graver charge, not on both E – F F So, two officials, who had committed the offences of bringing in an offence as lighter than it was shown to be, and bringing a false accusation, escaped their full term of punishment for these, and were sentenced on another and graver charge of misappropriating large sums of public money (H. A. H. L. vol. V. p. 1).

The rule is one which operates curiously at times. Thus, in the case of Chang Ch'ing two distinct offences were committed: the one,

gambling, the other, beating the man with whom the offender was gambling so seriously that he committed suicide. For gambling, the offender became liable to two months cangue, and for the other offence, to one hundred blows and three years transportation. Escaping the former punishment, according to the rule, the offender also escaped the latter, because he was the only son and sole support of a man over seventy years of age (as to which see later), and was in the end sentenced to only one month's cangue.

It may thus be regarded as sometimes of advantage to an offender to commit more than one offence. It should be noted that, in determining which of several offences is the most serious, the penalty is the test, and although decapitation is a heavier punishment than strangulation, strangulation without appeal is considered heavier than decapitation subject to revision at the Autumn Assize (H. A. H. L. vol. XXIII. p. 58). The above question seems to have arisen in two instances in the reign of Ch'ien Lung; in both cases, the offender had committed two offences, the one, rendering him liable to immediate strangulation, and the other,

to deferred decapitation, and, though the point seems to have been decided, in both cases, by the issue of a special edict making the sentence immediate, it was at the same time allowed that immediate strangulation was heavier than deferred decapitation (H. A. H. L. vol. V. p. 2).

As regards several offences of equal gravity, an offender can, as a rule, only be sentenced upon one: but, in the case of two capital offences of equal gravity, the penalty may be increased. Thus, if the penalty for either offence be summary decapitation, exposure of the head will be added. To come within the application of this practice the offences must not be against the same, but against different statutes; hence in the case of Shao Ming-tê, wherein the offender was guilty of successive rape upon two women, it was held that both offences being against the same statute the penalty could not be increased (H. A. H. L. vol. LII. p. 6).

If several offences are charged at different times, and the punishment of the first of the charges has been already inflicted, the latter charges will not subject the offender to further