The New Orleans crescent. [volume] (New Orleans, La.) 1866-1869, 1869-02-02
The DEATH PENALTY,

announced that Twitchell, the Philadelphlan
| who not long since dispatched his mother-in-
| law from motives more sordid than those
| which impelled Nero to take the life of his
mother. has been sentenced to be hanged for
the murder of both his wife and his wifes
mother. 1t is the horrible truth, however,
that Mrs. Twitchell was the accomplish in the
| deed for which her husband is condemned to
die, and that if he is guilty of felonious killing,
the crime of matricide rests peculiarly upon
| her.
To speak the most gently of the Phila-
delphia Justice which in this case acquits the
murderess and proceeds to hang the murderer,
| it must be said that the discrimination is hard
| to reconcile to the moral sense. There is
something profoundly faulty in the practical
working of a jurisprudence that admits of a
verdict in which proved guilt is declared to
be innocence. The Philadelphia jury, it is to
| be presumed believed that greatly extenu-
| ating circumstances existed in favor of the
wife. But equity with extenuating circum-
Stances" was, technically, an impossible
verdict; there was no available ground of COM
promise between unqualified conviction and
unqualified acquital; and the tender hearted
Philadelphia jurymen chose to lay themselves
| palpablY open tn tho charge of perjury rather
than to commend guilty woman to capital
| punishment.
1t is difficult, however, to conceive any plea
of extenuation in behalf of the wife that
might not have been invoked, for a stronger
reason, in behalf of the husband Some
writers, indeed, have urged in a serio-comic
strain of which the comicality, perhaps, was
only decent mask for the seriousness, that
whenever a mother-in-law is violently ''put
out of the way" by wife or husband, the pre-
sumption of justifability lies in favor of the
author of her premature exit from the scene
of domestic perplexity and trouble. But
according to this Philadelphia verdict, such a
presumption is only admissible where the
motherhood of the person taken off is that of
consanguinity, not of affinity; of natures
making, not of the laws. We do not grudge
the comfort which this doctrine, should it
come into vogue, would afford to mothers-in-
law, a class of beings as useful and indispen-
sable in their way as they are maligned and
disparaged but inasmuch as it tacitly denies
legal protection for mothers, the class that
constitutes at once the base and the coronal
| glory of society, against the avarice and the
cruelty of unnatural daughters, we denounce
| it as utterly scandalous and execrable.
For the rest, it is not to be doubted that the
anomalous and inconsistent mercy of the
Philadelphia jury towards Mrs. Twitchell is,
pro tdnto, protest against the death penalty.
Nor Is it to be doubted that the same senti-
ment works, with constantly increasing force,
among jurymen elsewhere than in Philadel-
| phia. If it is now too shocking to the sensi-
bilities to condemn to death woman guilty
of capital crime, it will at length be too
shocking to the sensibilities to consent to the
infection Of the same penalty on a male
felon. One of the great questions, therefore,
for speculative jurisprudence to consider, is
| how to deal with murderous criminals so as,
without killing them, to secure the utmost
protection for society. Perpetual imprison-
ment, as substitute for hanging, is regarded,
not without reason, as a very doubtful expert
nent. John Stuart Mill objects to it as in fact
the most cruel of all punishments and yet
to the criminal imagination less dreadful than
death on the gibbet, and therefore less effica-
cious for the prevention of crime. On the
other hand, the opponents of the death PEN
atty argue that the killing of culprits by Off
GERS of the law only cheapens the value of
human life in the estimation of the criminal
classes, and that the abolition of the penalty
would teach the most depraved such a lesson
of the sacredness of human life as would
greatly tend to overcome their propensity
under any circumstances, to take
it. However this may be, the
necessity remains for restraining criminality,
and the fact remains that any form of punish
ment adopted in place of judicial killing will
depend for its efficacy upon the certainty of
its infection. For it may be safely assumed
that those who commit crimes which are pun
ishable in any manner, do so either with reck-
less indifference to penal consequences, or
with vivid hope, founded upon reasonable
expectation, of subsequent IMMUNITY. The
great vice of criminal justice in this country,
under the operation of the jury system, has
been that it has steadily promoted the last
named condition of overt criminality in minds
subject to criminal impulses. No change in
the grade or manner of punishment will of
itself reform this vice. Everything will de-
pend upon the administration of the criminal
code at last If IMMUNITY is to be the rule
and punishment the exception, penal justice
will be as scandalous and unwholesome farce
as it is now, and society will continue to be
infested by criminals under the quasi-nurture
and quasi-shelter of the law
The New York Tribune and other Radical
papers-hkewise General Grant-think that
England ought to be made to pay not only for
the losses inflicted directly by the Alabama
and other Confederate cruisers, but also for