Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 April 1885 — “Shall the Sentence be Commuted?” [ARTICLE]

“Shall the Sentence be Commuted?”

We answer,'ye >! Capital puniskmefit j is a featuro ol our law “which has been borrowed from the barbarisms of the past.” The reluctance of modern juries to infiict the death penalty demon-, titrates that the tendencies of our age are against capital punishment. Had Warmer been a mail of intelligence, employed counsel, defied his guilt aud submitted his case to a jury of his countrymen, he never would have been sentenced to hang. It is a question whether or not he. would have been found guilty. Hut lie was poor, igm - rant, and in a land of strangers, without a friend, and those of his own Nationality, bitterly hostile toward hind Wpi felia idly conscious of what ho did, apd with an iuadeqalo conception of the penalty, he confessed his awful crime. Will not society he as well protected with Wartner consigned to imprisonment for life, as if he were in the grave? He has no friends of influence to importune for a pardon. The prison doors once closed around hiru, they will remain closed forever. When there are two methods of accomplishing the same result, is it not manly and IChristian-lika to. choose the more merciful? Remember, that we are not asking that he be turned loose .on soci ety,"but we do ask for life, which man can not give, and which he has no "Inond tight to take away. v . 'Justice. Vd,