"Bedad, I had th' divil av a time av it! Elivin o' thim were for lettin' him go entirely!"
THE SENTENCE
"What have you to say why judgment of the court should not be pronounced against you according to law?"
With these words begins the final chapter of the convict's history. He has been arraigned for the last time at the bar of justice, after a jury of his peers has declared him "guilty," and now awaits his sentence.
The judge who presides at the trial of a criminal case does but begin his labors when he receives the jury's verdict. If he be a man of sensibilities the strain of a trial is as nothing compared with the responsibility of determining whether the defendant shall be let go free under a "suspended" sentence or ordered to prison. No one appreciates the horror of prison life or its effect upon the individual better than the judge himself, and he may pass many a sleepless night before sentencing a man whose circumstances and whose years suggest the possibility of reformation.
Where the defendant has been found guilty of murder in any of its degrees the judge is, of course, relieved of the responsibility of determining the sentence, which is fixed by law, and the interrogation of the clerk must seem but a mockery to the prisoner, who knows that, whatever he may say in his own behalf, the judgment of the court will be the same. For this reason counsel rarely address the court upon the sentence in such a case, but sometimes the prisoner himself seeks a last public opportunity to assert his innocence or proclaim his repentance.
On Saturday morning, March 21, 1829, Richard Johnson, convicted of the murder of Ursula Newman, was brought to the bar of the New York Court of Oyer and Terminer, and was asked what he had to say why judgment of death should not be pronounced against him according to law. In the faded ink of the records of the General Sessions is inscribed the following: