I ALWAYS enjoy the Barrie Hudson column in the SA. Last Tuesday 5 August, I found the “It’s just another slap on the wrist” item of interest where Barrie made comment about the lenient sentences passed down to criminals by the local judiciary.

There have been a number of correspondences to the letters page recently regarding experimenting on animals in laboratories for medical science.

With so many drug dealers, rapists, paedophiles, thieves, wife beaters etc, why don’t the judges and magistrates send these useless members of society to the laboratories instead of using innocent animals? At least it would make them do something useful which would benefit us all.

R Albrighton, Shaw, Swindon