Waterbury evening Democrat., 1888-01-21

| criminal, startles society by some atrocious
 deed Hanging is too cruel a death" say
 the freside philanthropists who are ever
 on the lookout for a moral sensation; and
 in furtherance of the merciful and moral ideas committee was appointed by the State of New York to examine and report on the most humane mode of inficting Capital punishment-as if it mattered to the victim what the mode so long as the
 mandate had to be enforced.
 To hang or not to hang; that was the
 question ;..and learned jurists; ministers of the gospel, which says, '"Thou shall not l kill;'' experts in surgical science-or art, 1 if you willard others supposed to have some knowledge on the delicate subject, l sat and discussed and took opinions and l decided. Hanging with all it's horrors
 was considered; the guillotine and the gar otte came in for thought; shooting was
 in the proposition after the manner of l military executions; we wonder if the commissioners took in the Shakespearean l idea of making the "quectus with bare
 bodkin:' at any rate Electricity had the | preference for the substitution of the
 hangman's methods giving to the agency
 of power and motor efficiency of the fu-
 ture, the new attribute of superceding
 the gallows for the execution of criminals.
 ''The punishment of death," report the
 commissioners, "must in every case be in
 ficted by causing to pass through the body
 of the convict current of electricity of
 sufficient intensity to cause death, and the
 application of such current must be con
 tinued until such convict is dead" There
 are other suggestions-thel living death of
 the convict, from the hour of sentence, in
 close and solitary confinement without intercourse or communication from the out
 side world; and the non-dehvery of the body after death to friends, but it's appro-
 priatlon to an hospital for dissection; no
 religious services over the remains, and other conditions, making the absolute ex-
 ecution the least painful part of the penalty.
 ; And this the philanthropists call human } ity Of course they could not have spoken as experts of the various degrees of pain attending the various modes of ex-
 ecuting the death sentence; not one of ; the most merciful commissioners had / ever experienced, we presume, the
 effect of the moose on the human vertebrse or the exquisite shock of electric cur } rent through the body; but each and all of r them had doubtless read Victor Hugos ( ct Df could have deduced therefrom that 7 the greatest pain of the criminal is not in the supreme moment when his life is taken by the executioner; but in those weary watches in which he counts time by 9 heart throbs to the moment he dies-the l days and nights in which he reviews the . contrast of the past and the present; the l hopes of other days with the despair now investing him; and yet the mercy of the humane commission would limit itself to - the momentary pain of the scaffold- and t that humanity is even questionablc-an : add an intensity of horror to the whole t period between sentence and execution. l. Thankful for small mercies may say the l. culprit awaiting his death doom.
 - Had this humane commission applied it. t self to an abolition of the death penalty y altogether there would be some ground fol : confidence in it's merciful designs-rathe1 . moral designs, for there would be no mercy
 in such abolition according to our ideas o1 n a substituted punishment. 'Thou shalt e not kill'' is the Almighty's unqualified | T ,o,f fo fol f low man. No man in an impulsive indi Il viduality or in calculated malice has right t to deprive another of his God-given life; and f no aggregation of men by State authority ;. for governmental expediency or in SO tt called social protection has any more o war1 ant than the individual slayer. We gran e all that may be said on the necessity O. IT. keeping Society together by the repression c of crime and the punishment of the crime l. classes. We admit that 8 stern head an( y a high hand are needful in the administra t. tion of our laws. We have no sympathie l. with the murderer; and it is because w e. have none, we advicate an abolition of tn le death penalty by the old system of hang r. ing, the proposed process of electrical mur
 
 or der or by any other means or measures ee save the fiat of the Almighty. The pun 50 ishment of death is not the deterrent it i e. supposed to be; there is romantic hal 'n about the hanging that makes the culpri s, deem himself hero; but let the sentenc h. be life solitary Imprisonment, with tn
 assured hopelessness of ever seeing tn t. light and life of liberty again. and ther es will be more efficacy in the prospect o of that living tomb, with all its remorse an 'h remembrances, than in the actual tom Ill where all is forgetfulness and peace. 70 THE New Haven News, in which pare n: originated ''the professors" question ,t able report from Washington, referred t # in another article, though still standing b