Whig and tribune. [volume] (Jackson, Tenn.) 1870-1877, 1874-09-05
FOR GOVERNOR,

Gov. BRowN's ADDRESS. Elsewhere
we publish an address of Gov. j. G.,
Brown TO the judicial and ministerial
officers and to the people of Tennes-
see, and also his proclamation offer
ing a liberal reward for the arrest and
conviction of the Trenton Jail break
ers. The spirit pervading these pa
pers is admirable, but we regret to say
that they will in the end amount to
nothing. If the men who shot to
death the four negroes taken from
Jail, see proper to walk into Trenton
tomorrow and surrender themselves
to the judicial, ministerial and peace
officers of Gibson county, with the re-
quest that they be tried and hung as
speedily as possible their request can
not be complied with, even if Gov.
Brown, in obedience to the summons
of the Avalanche were to go over to
Gibson and lend his influence to the
prosecution. There are in Madison
county to-day twenty-eight negroes,
who, about one year ago, were arrest
cd and brought to the Jackson Jail,
charged with having murdered a
white man named John West in his
own cabin, in the nighttime, in the
presence of his own wife and children.
Their guilt was clear, for several of
the number confessed the crime, and
seemed proud Of it. The people were
anxious to punish them-the court
and the commonwealth attorney
were fully aware of this fact-but the
machinery of the criminal law of the
State was found to be utterly made
quate to meet the plain requirements
of justice, and to-day those negroes
are as free as the air to go where they
please.
How, it may be asked did this come
to pass? The constitution of Tennes-
see provides that criminal shall be
tried in the county where the offence
is committed. The prisoner, however,
if he chooses can change the venue.
Then follow the long line of Supreme
Court decisions aud statutes, running
back through three generations to the
foundation of the State, which, taken
together, form an impregnable bar
rier in favor of the prisoner, against
which prosecuting attorneys exhaust
their strength in vain. The fault
with our Esystem of criminal law is
one shared by all the sparsely popula-
ted States of the Union. 1t grows
out of blind adherence to the old
common law, which while it works
well in the dense populations of the
cities or of the swarming rurul COM
munities of Old or even New England,
plays havoc with the plain demands
Of right and reason in the West and
South. The prisoner has thirty-fve
peremptory challenges and this num-
Der is to be multiplied by the number
Of prisoners placed on trial. The
jury material of the county is COM
posed of those who are either free
holders or householders, who are gen
orally men who can read and who do
read newspapers. Under the long
established rulings or our Supreme
Court, where any one has read an ac-
count of a crime and any impression
has been left on his mind that it would
require testimony to remove, he must
stand aside challenged for cause.
This amounts to excluding from the
jury all those who have ever heard of
a murder, or of any scrime. In this
age of telegraphs, railroads, news
papers, grange meetings, country
churches and public gatherings of all
kinds, this amounts to the exclusion
of nearly every householder and free
holder in the land. When this ele-
ment is exhausted, the State is pow
erless. There is no statute to author
ize the sheriff to go to an adjoining
countyland Isummons panel after panel
of fresh jury material who know no.
thing of the case on trial, and it is
doubtful if such statute would be
allowed to stand, as the constitution
demands for the prisoner trial in
the county where the offence was COM
mitted, and as such a statute might
be deemed in contravention of the
spirit of this demand. Whenever
there is any peculiar atrocity about an
act, as a matter of course it will be-
como widely known in an agricultu-
raj country, where crime is compare
lively rare. This widespread public
ity saves the criminal. Therefore
the more wicked the act may be, the
more certain does the escape of the
perpetrator become. We can illus
trate our meaning more clearly in this
way: Suppose that any one were to
walk into any church in Jackson and
in broad day shoot the minister in
his pulpit The news of such hor-
ror would penetrate every homestead
in Madison county in a week, and if
the murderer, although taken red
handed, were not to be torn to pieces
by a mob, he would in all probability
go free, simply because the theoreti-
cal jury, with minds as clear of i'm
preston as to his guilt or innocence
rs blank sheet of paper, could not
be found. What householder or free
holder in Gibson has not heard of the
Trenton iail-breaking and its bloody
sequel?
Murders, suicides and confagra-
tions are of daily occurrence in New
YORK city, and in all thickly popula-
ted communities, rural or urban. In
Lancashire, in the great cities, in
densely peopled New England, juries
can be obtained where the criminal
law is substantially like ours, but in
the Southern and Western States they
cannot be. The people in these States
are law-abiding and law-loving. This
is one of the grandest characteristics
of the great race to which we belong.
Assassination is crime peculiar to
the races of Southern Europe, and
aversion to It is universal among all
English speaking nations. But the
people of the West and South find
that somehow or other, under the op-
Grafton of laws handed down to them
by their ancestors, the worst of GRIM
mails escape punishment, and the jail
becomes to them city of refuge, as
safe as those to which the Jewish
murderer fled in days of old. The