Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 June 1906 — Shall the Prosecutions Be Pushed? [ARTICLE]

Shall the Prosecutions Be Pushed?

Tom McCoy has received his punishment. Hot a very severe one for the magnitude of bis crimes, as many people think, and yet for a man who has always stood as he has and lived and moved as be has, t is a most bitter punishment, and he also feels it most bi terly, and is broken and repentant. He also sees and freely admits as the great mistake of his life when he left Rensselaer and pnt himself under the influence of the Taylor family in Lafayette, of whom the one who robbed the treasury of South Dakota and suffered imprisonment for his crime seems the most noted exemplar. Being thus punished and thus repentant and all efforts abandoned towards fighting the sentence that be has received, we believe there should be no further thought of prosecuting him ou any of the other charges now standing •gainst him, though they should be allowed to stand until it becomes clearly evident from his own and his relatives future conduct that his repentance tie as real as it now seems to be. Bat what should be done now with the other'charges against A 1 fired McCojjff Granting that his age is an element in-his favor, it should also be remembered that he is still defiant and unrepentant. He is the man who, 'though declared by bis ribald attorneys to be head and shoulders above every other man in Jasper -eounty in nobility of character and .generosity of disposition, yet who, all during the long period «f his trial walked or sat about ihe-streets of Monticello deelaringto be liars and hippocrits every man who gave evidence unfavorable to him. He is the one too who, nhongh loudest at first and seemingly most sincere, in his promises to doeverything possible; and to make every sacrifice towards reparation-of; the losses of his credi -tors, s*et -was the first to repudiate these promises. and the most insult ing in denying he had ever made •them. Moreover it should be re me-inhered that when offered the in come of slo| 060 for life for his and his wife’-e-support, as a free gift by his wife’s brother, Addison Parkisen, he spurned this offei, which exceeded imgenerosity all the much landed generous and charitable acts of has whale life, pat together, and deedared he -would be a d—n fool to (take a life-estate in SIO,OOO when he could get instead, $30,000 absolutely, out etf-his bankrupt estate. It should be remembered also, that while he claims that it was losses in live stock investments which eaasp'l his -overdraft at the hauk, that «rbat foe let the Rine harts get fr*u him, directly and indirectly, would have more than made that overdraft good. That too aside from the huge sums that the estates have to pay for Rinehart’s security detas. Mr. McCoy's private pass hook shows that there was a steady and never ending drawing out of money from the bank for the Rineharts and which was charged to Uncle Mac’s account That whenever Mrs BiDehart was in town that never a d <y passed when the bank was open that she did not draw money from it and have it charged to her fa’l Mr’s account It should 1 be remembered, still further, that after all this $60,000 or so known, and nobody knows how ranch in unknown, amounts taken from the bank for Bin -hart’s benefit, be was pot in posse .-ion of the bank, with the apparent intention of looting what was left, and that before his successor obi sifted possession, many valuable papers and documents had disappeared and have never been recovered. And that since his removal be has filed a claim lor SI,OOO or over S6O a day for bisservicee as assignee, and that preposterous and unconscionable suits for an 1 aggregate of oversßo,ooo have been

filed by Mrs. Rinehart, or rather in her name, and no donbt by Uncle Mac’s own instigation. Lastly, let it not be forgotten that 11 out of the 12 jurors who tried the case just ended believed this ‘‘Noble Old Roman” of Haywood’s balderdash was guilty and should be punished, and that it is the practically universal opinion here that some criminal means were used which prevented the jury from being unanimous on that point.