Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 November 1884 — Sending a Kentuckian to Death. [ARTICLE]

Sending a Kentuckian to Death.

The difficulty with some people to comprehend the distinction between a mandatory and an advisory railway commission is very amusingly illustrated in an anecdote related by a very witty member of tho Kentucky bar. A criminal judge had before him a hardened and notorious criminal, who had been found guilty of a crime for which the penalty was death. The Judge, on pronouncing sentence, told the prisoner it afforded him extreme pleasure to pronounce upon him the severest penalty of the law, and the Sheriff would be directed to take him from the Court House to the jail, and thence, on a given date, at a given hour, to bo taken to the jail yard and there be banged by the neck until he was dead, dead, dead. The Judge then asked the prisoner if he had anything to say why the sentence of death should not be pronounced against him. “Well, not much,” said the prisoner, with imperturbable sang fyoid. “All I have to say to the 7 court and everybody connected with it is that, if it affords them any pleasure to have me hanged till I am dead, dead, dead, then this court and all connected with it may just go., to hell, hell, hell. “Ah!” instantly exclaimed the Court, “in the Court’s case the order is mandatory, but in that of the prisoner it is only_ advisory. Mr. Sheriff, let the sentence be executed..”— Nashville American. A woman has held the office of Justice of the Peace in one of the mountain towns of Kentucky for the last ten years without legal authority.