Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1876 — Trials of a Prison Convict. [ARTICLE]

Trials of a Prison Convict.

Nearly nine years ago a man named Moses Wheeler was sentenced to the State Prison for the crime of arson. The evidence against him was conclusive. Wheeler, however, protested his innocence, and declared that the testimony against him was a conspiracy to get rid of him, oh account of a few dollars that were in dispute. He also was prepared to prove an alibi, but for some unknown reason his witnesses were not called by the Government, and Wheeler was compellea to go into State Prison. Not quite a year ago a woman, the wife of the man who was instrumental in getting Wheeler into prison, the husband of the woman having died in the meantime, confessed on her bed, in the town of Wakefield, that Wheeler was innocent of the charge upon which he had been convicted. Duringthe eight years in which the man had been imprisoned he had endeavored to obtain a pardon, the authorities having been quite satisfied that be was innocent. It was upon this woman’s testimony, more than anything else, that he was convicted. Immediately following the death-bed confession, which was duly made before a Justice of the Peace, poor Wheeler was Eardoned. And now he comes before the legislature and asks the State to reimburse him in the sum of $30,000, the amount which he would probably have earned had he lived as a free man. The committee on the subject, while admitiin? the justice of the petition, have given Wheeler “leave to withdraw,” on the ground that the payment of such a sum to him, under the circumstances, “would establish an expensive precedent.” Wheeler is not the first citizen of the State who has done “time” at Charlestown upon perjured evidence. Wheeler feels the stigma of State Prison life clinging to him, yet he has no means of redress. His present motto is, “ God Save the State of Massachusetts.” And still hundreds of guilty wretches are allowed to go free.— Boeton Cor. Chicago Journal.