Oh! wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us;
but I never heard anybody utter the opposite aspiration, for the gift to see others as they see themselves. And yet I am not quite sure that this gift is not as desirable as the other. At any rate, if we are to legislate wisely and well for any class of people it is absolutely necessary that we should be able to see things from their own point of view. It is with much hesitation that I start this chapter, for I know that my power to analyze thought and character is not great enough to enable me to deal with the subject on broad lines. But if I can induce a few people to consider the question of murder and its punishment from the murderer’s point of view, the chapter will do good.
On the whole, I think that our attitude towards murderers is based too much on sentiment and too little on reason. Many people pity all murderers, whether they deserve it or not; many others condemn them body, soul and spirit, without considering to what extent they are the result of circumstances. If I can induce my readers to consider that a murderer has as much right to judge the State as the State has to judge him, I think this book will have achieved one good purpose.
I do not wish to work out an argument, but will just give a few of the expressed ideas of the murderers, in the hope that they may give rise to fruitful trains of thought. I would point out, however, that many of the people who have died on the scaffold have lived in such deplorable circumstances—assailed by every sort of temptation, surrounded by an atmosphere of gay and hollow vice, cradled in misery and educated in wretchedness and sin, with little of the good and the beautiful entering into their lives to raise them, but with the accursed facility for obtaining drink to lure them down—in such deplorable circumstances, I say, that even an angel could hardly keep himself unspotted from such a world. When men commit a horrible crime it is our duty to exact the penalty; but it will do us no harm to consider whether we are in any way responsible for the conditions which may have driven them to crime; and whether we cannot do even more than we are doing for the prevention of crime by the improvement of the conditions.
Besides the conditions of life, the mental status of the wretched culprits should be worthy of attention, and I think we might ask ourselves whether it would not have been better for some of the murderers, as well as for society, if they had been placed under life-long restraint years before their careers reached the murder stage.
There are many other questions which will naturally occur to the thoughtful reader, and which I need not indicate.
Arthur Shaw.
Amongst my earlier executions was that of Arthur Shaw at Liverpool. Shaw was a tailor, thirty-one years of age, who lived in Manchester. He was married, but his married life was not happy, for his wife seems to have drunk heavily, and he himself was not steady. On November 3rd, 1884, they quarrelled, and fought for some time, and shortly afterwards the woman was found dead—killed, according to the doctors, by strangulation. Shaw did not deny the murder, but pleaded that it was unintentional, and that he had been greatly provoked by his wife’s long-continued dissipation. The jury strongly recommended him to mercy. Immediately before meeting his fate, in a last conversation with the chaplain, the man admitted his guilt but earnestly insisted that he had never intended to cause his wife’s death. He stated that he was not drunk at the time of the murder, but that he had been driven to drink by his wife’s drunkenness and neglect of the home, which was always miserable; and that her drunkenness and neglect exasperated him until he was perfectly wild. He concluded by saying: “When we were having the scuffle I had no idea I was killing the poor woman.”