Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 February 1899 — Lynchers Haver Caleb Their Own Game [ARTICLE]

Lynchers Haver Caleb Their Own Game

The Terre Hante Express, in speakiug editorially of the antilynching law, says: “There are now pending in the legislature a revised bill to disoourage lynching. It does not seek to hold the county liable to the family of the mob’s victim for damages, bat to make the sheriff responsible for the protection of prisoners. The penalty for surrendering a prisoner to the organized party of lynchers is removal from office. The principal of this bill is defensible so far as its effects tbe sheriff after a prisoner has come into custody, bat that official cannot be held responsible for the life of a suspect who may be overtaken and hung by tbe mob before his arrest.” But if the Terre Haute papers can cite a single instance where lynchers in Indiana have done their own catching before hanging, it is more-than we think it can. In every case, from the heroic and wholesale, and also somewhat justifiable swinging off of the Reno gang, root, branch and collaterals, some 25 years ago; down to the disreputable and wholly unj ustifiable strangulation of the small caliber criminal Scott, a few weeks ago, the lynchers have taken their victims from the custody of officers or from jails. Cases of lynching where the lynohers take the trouble to do their own catching before hanging are too infrequent to worry about.