The prisoner replies:
If your Honor please. I am asked what I have to say why judgment of death should not be pronounced against me? To this I reply—To the judgment of the law, nothing. A jury of my country has pronounced me guilty; and there remains no discretion with the court but to pronounce upon me the sentence of the law. But to the judgment of the world I have much to say. I have been convicted of a crime the bare recital of which causes humanity to shudder. And it is a duty which I owe to myself while living, and to my memory when dead that the circumstances of my offence should be fully explained. Before entering into the detail, I must take this public opportunity in the name of that omniscient and all-merciful Being who will hereafter pronounce his judgment, alike upon my judges & myself, of disclaiming any knowledge of the transactions of that fatal 20th of November. I do not mean to impugn the decision of the jury; the movements of the mind were beyond their power to penetrate; and hard as is my fate I humbly bow to their verdict. I cannot here enter fully into the details of my intimacy with the unfortunate cause of my present awful situation. Duped and betrayed as I have been into sorrow and bitter despair, and lastly involuntary crime I am unwilling while living to indulge in unavailing reproaches. In life the deceased was the object of my tenderest affection. An affection that her own unkind conduct seemed to inflame, and that, baffled in its honorable purpose—expelled reason from her throne, and, in its absence, led to the commission of the offence, for which I am now to satisfy the offended community by my own life. Was I conscious of any moral guilt, at this result I should not repine. Accustomed throughout my life to respect the law, I have not now to learn that the blood of the murderer is alike a propitiating sacrifice to the laws of God and man. Convicted of the legal crime I know my fate. For the moral offence I have to answer to my conscience and my God; and that innate monitor tells me, that I stand before this court and this community a legal but not a moral murderer. To my counsel who have so ably though vainly made my defence, I tender my warmest thanks. Of the court I have but one request to make, that the period allowed me to prepare for my impending fate may be as long as the law will permit.
The sentence of the court was then pronounced.
Compare this solemn and thrilling declaration with what occurred upon the sentence of Dr. Carlyle W. Harris, convicted of the murder of his girl-wife by the administration of morphine capsules which he compounded and furnished to her. He had married her secretly under an assumed name and in all probability had never intended to recognize her as his wife. Events finally rendered it impossible for him to conceal the marriage longer, and, realizing this, he procured for her the medicine which caused her death. Harris was a gentleman,—or rather he was a very debonair, nonchalant, and brazen imitation of one. Throughout his trial he had preserved an absolutely unruffled exterior, chatting affably with counsel and court attendants, and receiving the verdict with undiminished equanimity. On the day set for his sentence he came into court with the easy and gracious manner of a young man paying an afternoon call. He was arraigned at the bar and the Recorder [Smyth] proceeded to rehearse the history of his terrible crime and stigmatize the loathsome character of his act. Harris listened politely, and apparently endeavored to show a considerable interest in his remarks. Then the Recorder made some slight error in giving a date.
"Pardon me, your Honor," interrupted the blithe defendant, "it was the eighteenth and not the nineteenth——" and corrected him.
The Recorder frowned and replied with dignity.
"That is a matter of slight importance!"
"I beg your Honor's pardon," returned Harris flippantly; "you see, I have never been sentenced to death before, and am not as familiar with the procedure as might be."
Unpleasant as is the duty of the prosecutor who is obliged to move that the sentence of death be pronounced, it is less terrible than listening to the few simple but hopeless words that doom a convict to life imprisonment. The murderer must die; but it will soon be over. The ghost of his victim will in a few weeks cease to haunt his dreams. But the "lifer"! Who can picture the horror of a life-time of repentance or of mocking remorselessness? "Civilly dead," he is doomed to drag out his weary years in an earthly tomb, a silent, forgotten creature, numbered like a human specimen, enduring all the tortures of purgatory until the end seems a far distant haven of oblivion. The court-room echoes, like the empty future of the white-faced prisoner, to the dull fall of the words upon his barren soul—"for the rest of your natural life." The listener shudders. "God grant that it be short!" he murmurs, then looks away.
Of course, in the seventeenth century and early in the eighteenth all felonies were punishable, not only in England but in America, by death. When the severity of punishment began to be abated and imprisonment substituted for the extreme penalty, all sentences were for a fixed and definite term, and the only way that the convict could obtain release or secure the modification of his sentence was by pardon from the supreme executive authority of the country.
Sometimes a ray of sunshine illumines the dreary pages of these parchment-bound volumes, the stiff phraseology of the crabbed entries failing to obscure it. For example, on Monday morning, March 29, 1784, "The Court met pursuant to adjournment" and was "opened by proclamation." The grand jury came into court and presented an indictment against one Sylvia, a negro slave, "for stealing monies from Alexr Johnson."