22 John Mitchell. Give him the sting of death to feel So dearly bought, so dearly loved; [Sept. What Mr. Charles Wesley thought of the ministers of state, who turned a deaf ear to the cry for mercy in this most melancholy case, may be learned from the following lines, which he wrote "after he execution." Ah, who the ways of Providence can know, And contrite Dodd for mercy sues in vain! Who mercy now to penitents deny, Guilty yourselves, and soon condemned to die, Judgment unmixed ye for yourselves prepare, It will be observed that Dr. Dodd, in his last note to Miss Bosanquet, requests her, should it ever be in her power, to befriend his bereaved wife. With this touching request there can be no doubt that Miss Bosanquet would be ready to comply. But her aid could be of little avail. The loss of Dr. Dodd's character, his imprisonment, his trial, his condemnation, the suspense connected with the unsuccessful attempts to obtain a commutation of punishment, and, above all, the terrible execution, were too much for the affectionate and sensitive mind of Mrs. Dodd to sustain. Reason fled; and this unfortunate lady died a maniac at Ilford, in Essex. Such were the bitter fruits of unsactifi ed pulpit popularity.-Life of Rev. Charles Wesley. ARTICLE XII. JOHN MITCHELL. THE deed of infamy is done! And England, kindling at thy shame, The soul of every free born one Must breathe a curse upon thy name! The deed is done! and he who stood, Of freedom and his country's good, Now, this danger of executing the innocent is not a mere bug-bear, a supposition conjured up to help our argument. It has been the case fearfully too often. I said, upwards of one hundred instances have occurred in the history of English jurisprudence. Mr. O'Sullivan, in his Report before the Legislature of New York, specifies the trains of evidence that, in several instances, have been the foundation of the execution of innocent men. "There have been cases," says he, "in which groans have been heard in the apartment of the crime, which have at. tracted the steps of those on whose testimony the case has turnedwhen on proceeding to the spot, they have found a man bending over the murdered body, a lantern in the left hand, and the knife yet dripping with the warm current, in the blood-stained right, with horror-stricken countenance, and lips which in the presence of the dead, seemed to refuse to deny the crime, in the very act of which he is thus surprised yet the man has been, many years after, when his memory alone could be benefitted by the discovery, ascertained not to have been the murderer. There have been cases in which a father has been found murdered in an out-house, the only person at home being a son, sworn by a sister to have been dissolute and undutiful, and anxious for the death of the father, and succession to the family property-when the track of his shoes in the snow is found from the house to the spot of the murder, and the hammer with which it was committed (known as his own) found, on a search in a corner of one of his private drawers, 24 Execution of the Innocent. [Sept. with the bloody evidence of the deed only imperfectly effaced from it -and yet the son has been innocent! The sister, years after, on her death-bed, confessing herself the fratricide as well as the parricide. There have been cases in which two men have been seen fighting in a field — an old enmity existing between them—the one found dead, killed by a stroke from a pitch-fork known as belonging to the other, and which the other had been carrying the pitch-fork lying by the side of the murdered man; and yet its owner has been afterwards found not to have been the author of the murder of which it had been the instrument - the true murderer sitting on the jury that tried him !” Such, my friends, have been some of the fallibilities of the criminal law. There are horrid deaths enough death by scorching flame, by racking torture, by being crushed under some immovable weight, and smothered; but of all deaths the most horrid are, that which is the result of being buried alive, and that in which a man dies by the hand of the law as a criminal, yet innocent. Which of these two is the worst, they only can know who experience, in either case, of its dying pangs. But is it not time that we were awake to the matter of the abolition of Capital Punishment? Awake to it, as a matter of sound policy – as a matter of social and individual security. Upon each one of us, individually, rests the execution of this penalty. It is your voice, it is mine, so long as we uphold it, that condemns a man to death. The judge, the executioner, is but our agent. Consider what sound policy, what true justice, what reason, and above all, what Christianity requires us to do. Consider the uncertainty of Capital Punishment. Consider its great disregard of the sanctity of life. Consider the increase of crime under its administration, the decrease of crime when it is abolished and then consider the innocent men who have suffered under it, that had imprisonment been the penalty might have lived to be restored in honor and in peace back to society. Let me close with this point, and if I appeal to your feelings in doing so, remember that I do not draw upon imagination, but from fatal facts. Let us look upon the man who dies guiltless, and yet who dies a felou's death. His last hour has come. Time and disease have been forestalled by justice. Let us enter his dungeon. Nay, look not around this is the common furniture of a prison, especially of the last abode of him, who, according to legal ethics, as he has sinned deeply must be sinned against in return. Look not around, but look at him the doomed man. Is there not a dreadful calmness in his face more awful than the malignity of guilt? But it is a fitful countenance, for now it is wild and fevered as if the insulted soul were stunned with amazement at the suddenness and weight of its charge, or would rend its very clay to plead its innocence. He has parted from the few who loved him to the last. Perhaps there was but one. He kissed the cold lips beneath which a heart was breaking, and, Oh !— thought to curdle the very blood in its fountain-perhaps over the embers even of that heart, a suspicion of his guilt is brooding like a spectre. But the time flies. Hark! it is the bell-toll-saying to him, "Come! Come! to a FELON's death!" He is bewildered, he is amaz. ed, he weeps, he says over the mockery of a prayer with stony lips as they lead him to the gibbet, with muffled feet, and creaking wheels, and doleful death-march. And what a crowd is there! Fashionable folly, rude profaneness, inebriety, thieving, lust, hoarse jesting with the executioner and the rope. One more prayer and his time has come. The fatal cap is drawn. Stop! stop! the multitude heaves like the billows of a yawning sea. Conscience has done its work at last! A man staggers pale and moist through the dense crowd, and lifts his clammy hands, and screams with agonized voice, "I am the murderer, not he!" Raise him up-raise up that INNOCENT man- let him hear it! Alas! it is too late. You may canonize his memory, but his spirit was bent too far. In that last struggle, it rushed from the presence of incredulous man, shrieking," Innocent! innocent!" up to the merciful God. ARTICLE XIV. CRUELTIES IN CLINTON PRISON. BY MRS. E. W. FARNHAM. MR. SPEAR:- The following article from the Plattsburgh Republican of Aug. 5th, will give some idea of how the new system of Prison Inspection in New York is working : Almost ever since the change of officers at this establishment last winter, the public mind in this region has been kept in a state of feverish excitement by the general suspension of useful industry at the prison, and the rumored sufferings of the convicts from hunger and other ill treatment. The steady policy of the present officers there, to keep the management of this institution as secret as possible from the public which established and supports it, has no tendency to convince the people that this is done for the purpose of concealing the good deeds of these officers. The difficulty of eliciting the truth, in regard to rumors respecting the improper treatment of convicts, where the prosecutor must depend on the unwilling testimony of associates in wrong, has deterred the community from instituting any public investigation until recently. On Friday last, however, George W. Sanborn, Sergeant of the Guard, at Clinton Prison, was brought to trial in this village, charged with assault and battery upon John Thurston, a convict in said prison. It appeared in testimony that Thurston's keeper went to his cell to bring him out for punishment; but for what offence the prosecutor was not allowed to show - rumor says it was for saying something to another convict. Thurston pleaded sickness, but his keeper called guards and led him to the punishing room. The physician said he was not sick, and Thurston was ordered to strip for punishment. This he refused to do, still pleading his sickness. The keeper then directed the guards to throw the convict on the floor and tear off his clothes. This the three guards and two keepers engaged in; the convict struggling only to 3 -0. S. VOL. IV. NO. XXXIV. N. S. VOL. I. NO. I. 26 Cruelties in Clinton Prison. [Sept. keep on his apparel; but he was entirely stripped with the bare exception that in tearing away the body of his shirt the collar and wristbands remained. When the convict was stripped, except his shoes and socks, and while held to the floor by three or four persons, for the purpose of taking them off, the defendant kicked him in the side or back he also subsequently struck him and afterwards boasted that "he had give him some." The convict struck no one, nor was it pretended the defendant acted in self-defence. The convict was then put in the stocks to suffer the water torture, but as the defendant had nothing to do with the punishment then inflicted, no evidence was allowed respecting it. The defendant was found guilty and fined twenty-five dollars. The next day John Forbes, one of the keepers engaged in the same affair was arrested, charged on oath with having struck Thurston with his cane, while he was naked and held to the floor-the blow from the cane raising a large ridge upon the convict's body. Forbes was put under bonds to appear and answer at the next Oyer and Terminer. Notwithstanding the brutality with which this convict was treated; held naked to the floor and then kicked, beaten and caned by those appointed to reform him by examples of mildness and forbearance; then shamefully exhibited in the stocks in a state of perfect nakedness and finally tortured, we know not how much more; yet throughout all this, it did not appear that he uttered one reproachful word. We leave others to say, which most deserve the prison uniform, the convict or his tormentors? The disgusting practice which these officers have adopted of exhibiting convicts in the stocks in a state of nudity, would excite the indignation of a barbarian, and forcibly exhibits the gross depravity which now controls this institution. Let us pause a while before we make another boast of our superior civilization and refine ment. To show the desperation to which the cruelties of the present offi. cers have driven the convicts, we may mention that the one who was shot a few days since, in attempting to escape, as he lay bleeding on the ground surrounded by the citizens outside, and some of the officers of the prison, he begged the Agent to communicate his fate to his father, and added, "I may as well die this way as to suffer and starve as we do in prison." We earnestly beseech the Prison Association to send a committee here who will expose the secrets of this prison-house to the light of the noon day sun. This of the Clinton Prison. The shocking state of that Institution is further shown in the fact that thirteen prisoners escaped from it between the first of February and the last of June. I am not informed if there have been more recent escapes. Of the condition of things at Auburn, I learn nothing; and from your own columns I gathered the latest intelligence that has reached me from Sing Sing-intelligence showing that horrors enough have been enacted there to counterbalance any acts of misplaced kindness of which the late officers were accused-any deeds of mercy that were recorded to the condemnation of the doers thereof. From all who leave those dismal walls there is but a single report, that all endeavors at improvement and |