Delaware gazette and state journal. (Wilmington, Del.) 1883-1902, 1891-02-19


The fifteen hundred people who stood
around Dover jail, in the mud and rain
OF Friday afternoon, saw two doomed
men mount the scaffold and, in Just
seven minutes, shoot downward to what
gave every indication of being an in
Simultaneous and painless death, No one
who witnessed this execution can doubt
that consciousness of life and suffering
ended for Jesse II. Proctor and Frederick
Young with the fall of the drop. The
probability is that they did not have
time to feel a particle of pain. Certainly
their suspended bodies gave no indica-
don thereof. There was not even the
customary convulsive raising of the
shoulders or heaving of thechest Death
by the electric stroke could not have
come, to all outward seeming, more
painlessly. If all executions by the
rope could be conducted as admirably as
Sheriff Cole, with the valuable assist
ance of Captain Rulings, managed this
one there would be no occasion to
search for more expeditions method of
inflicting capital punishment. The law
was infinitely more merciful in death to
these two murderers than they were in
the death they inflicted upon their poor
old victim, Stephen Lindsay.
1t is proper to add that Governor
Reynolds acted rightly in allowing the
law to take its course in regard to both
Of fbaea p,op fHbo 1ntXf If tbn frpyor,,t,,
was one that caused him great mental
anxiety. He did not want to be lacking
in mercy, but he could not permit
mercy to outweigh the claims Of justice.
He spent disquieted days and nights in
balancing the pleas of the few against
the impressed but outspoken sentiment
of the many-the sentiment that a just
regard for public safety demanded that
the law be allowed TO take its course;
that the youthful criminal whose hand
did the deed of blood, although that
deed was contrived in the brain of his
Iolder confederate, should not escape the
penalty unless his lack of mental re-
sponsibility were clearly established
trary, the evidence in the case, the testi-
money of those who had known Fred
Young from childhood, the judgment
of most of those who saw and con-
yersed with him in his cell, all these
things went to demonstrate that
though illiterate and ignorant there WAS
no vestige of natural incapacity to dis
tinguish between right and wrong that
he was fully accountable, as he had
himself admitted to his captors, that he
knew it was wrong to kill old man
Lindsay but that he did not expect to
be caught The Governor, in his deci-
sion not to interfere in this case, will be
sustained by the people at large and the
people at large are very apt to be right
in their conclusion that the public safety
demands that the sane human being
who deliberately murders another in cold
blood and for his money should die by
the hangman's rope.
There has been some Misrepresentation
as to why this hanging was allowed to
be done practically in public II was
not question of the expenditure Of
$24 for the erection of an enclosure
sufficiently high to shut out the spectacle
from those outside, as some have evil
IDENTIFY supposed. The proposition to
do this was voted down by the Kent
county levy court, not from motives Of
economy or parsimony, but because the
fDnipritU If fiat bn1v favnrnd d, a i,,gr
the hanging as public as the law
and the circumstances would per-
init. They held that the exam
pie Of life taken by outraged
law would have a stronger deterrent
effect upon those who saw it than if
they had merely read Of it or heard the
story of the few legal witnesses Of the
hanging, and that in community
where hangings come 20 years apart eX-
perience has shown that publicity has
wrought at least no appreciable harm,
even if it cannot be satisfactorily de-
monstrated that the effect has been salu-
tary. This way Of looking at the mat
ter will strike many of EVERY EVEN
ING's readers As decidedly counter to
the spirit of the age in which we live
and as one which the moral sentiment
of other communities has putgrown, but
it is only fair to the Kent county levy
court to state that it was this view, and
not cheese-paring parsimony, that pre-
vailed by vote Of five to four, in that
body.