Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1911 — Is Life Imprisonment Worse than Death? [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Is Life Imprisonment Worse than Death?

THERE are times when a hush, a stillness that is awful In its intensity, falls over a courtroom! The trial has dragged out its painful length, the evidence is in, the pleas have been made and the Jury has returned a verdict expressed in’ that one short .AngloSaxon word, “Guilty.” The convicted mmderer rises to his feet at the command of the judge. He stands up to receive the measured sentence of the law. Every eye in the courtroom is turned upon him and every ear is strained to catch the words that will mean life or death to the unfortunate who stands upright to meet the blow. If you stood in his place would you hope for those ominous words, ‘‘Hanged by the neck until dead,” or would you welcome a sentence of “life imprisonment?” If you knew That “life imprisonment” meant just what it is supposed to mean and that there was no hope of escape, no hope of pardon, nothing but the long months reaching Into drab monotonous, loathsome years of loneliness, would you still choose to cling to the life that was in you? The legal world was shocked and the public was horrified by the plea of Albert A. Patrick, convicted murderer of the millionaire, William Marsh Rice, who demanded* death rather than life imprisonment. In a remarkable document he tried to reject clemency that saved him from the electric chair, him life imprisonment in the place of death. His petition recited this, as his principal reason: “Life imprisonment is a far severer punishment than death in any form." This action of his has no parallel in the court records of the United States. It was a remarkable assertion made by a remarkable criminal. It caused many jurists to wonder if, after all, the deprivation of liberty ought to be allowed to take the place of the death penalty. Judge Kavanaugh’s Opinion. A Chicago courtroom listened recently to a strange address made by Judge Marcus Kavanaugh, Joseph. Welcome, the prisoner at the bar, had pleaded “guilty" to the charge of murder. It was a crime of peculiarly aggravating circumstances. Welcome had driven his wife from home. He followed her to the boarding house of Mrs. Mary McLean and a quarrel ensued. Enraged by her avowed intention of quitting him forever, he drew a revolver and shot her down. In attempting to save' the life of the unfortunate woman Mrs. McLean was killed by a bullet from the degenerate’s weapon. Moved by the plea of guilty and his appeal for the mercy of the court, the Jury fixed Welcome’s punishment at life imprisonment. When the prisoner rose to receive the sentence. Judge Kavanaugh said: "Welcome, you committed a terrible crime. Your punishment is to be more terrible stilL When your wife sought to escape you shot her. It was no fault of yours that she lived and that you, in fact, then killed another woman who was making useful way in the world. You could hardly get

twelve men in the box who would not inflict the death penalty upon you, yet it is the policy of the lav?., to regard a plea of some measure of itself a mitigation. “The instinctive, unreasoning horror of mankind regards death as the most severe punishment. This idea is not correct. You are now to receive a sterner punishment: Yojir victim died l)ut once. You \till die a hundred times. You will suffer more the day you put on your prison clothes than she did in her death. “After that there will be only the hopeless, painful years, from day to day, from month to month, stretching out forever and in agony. In four or five years the eternal solitude and silence will begin to crush in jtipon you like an iron weight. “You are so elated now at the thought of saving your life that you, don’t realize all this. I want you and the others here in this courtroom to understand it. You are not sorry yet for your crime. You have only a great self-pity. “There will be few worse men than you in that big prison, but I may say the law has taken its full and ample revejage upon you.” Welcome has now entered upoa-the monotonous round of the “Living Death” that Judge Kavanaugh described. He is now a “thing” in striped clothes, a number that has its home in the heart of a great mass of stone and steel and concrete, watched by riflemen on forbidding walls, the great state prison at Joliet. It 1b possible that he has already glimpsed something of the punishment that is to be his, so long as breath and reason remain within his body. Was Judge Kavanaugh right? Is it true that life imprisonment is a more terrible punishment than the extinction of the criminal? no men die a hundred deaths where their victims died but one? His pronouncement is new, so far as the bench is concerned. It has been debated, however, for generations by philosopher's and students. Cold reason tells the human mind that death would be preferable to a life lived in the narrow confines of steel cages and stony corridors, but every criminal welcomes the alternative of imprisonment all his days when actually confronted by the gallows or the electric chair. Judge Kavanaugji’s speech to the condemned man serves to awaken interest in that last and greatest of the powers of the state, the right to take human life. In all civilized countries in the world, with one exception, the death penalty is exacted of the murderer and the traitor. Italy is the single exception, but rarely an attempt to secur* itW ownmutation of a murder's sehteitcfc in that country. When he is finally,, sentenced, it is the end, for there !»' no hope of pardon except in the- most undoubted case? of innocence, and thus far the prison gates of that country have never swung open to release a murderer. In America there is always hope so long as there is life.

PRONOUNCING THE LIFE SENTENCE