Such penalties foster crimes, whose
roots take hold of the state itself.
The result of the exercise of the pardoning power is believed to have
been, upon the whole, satisfactory. This is the concurrent testimony of
officers and others whose opinions are entitled to weight. Permit the
statement of a single case, to which many similar ones might be added.
In a remote state of the West there is a respectable and successful
farmer, who was once sentenced to the penitentiary for life. His crime
was committed in a moment of desperation, produced by the contrast
between a state of abject poverty in a strange land, at the age of
twenty-three, and the recollection of childhood and youth passed beneath
the parental roof, surrounded by the comforts and conveniences of the
well-educated and well-conditioned classes of English society. This, it
is true, was a peculiar case. It was marked in the circumstances and
enormity of the crime, and marked in the subsequent good conduct of the
prisoner. But can any one object, that, after ten years' imprisonment,
this man was allowed to try his fortunes once more among his fellow-men?
Are there those who would have had no faith in his uninterrupted good
conduct; in the abundant evidence of complete reformation; in the fact
that, in prison and poverty and disgrace, he had allied to him friends
of name and fortune and Christian virtues, who were ready to aid him in
his good resolutions? If any such there be, let them visit the solitary
cell of the despairing convict, whose crime is so great that executive
clemency fears to approach it.
Pages:
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92