The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-05-10
NEW HAVEN MORNING JOURNAL AND COURIER MAY 10

was actually embraced and consoled by the real murderers just before being launched into eternity-he all the while vainly protesting his innocence.
 Again, capital punishment is to-day very reluctantly imposed. It is there- fore slow and uncertain. But nothing is better settled than that 1t Is the cer- tainty rather than the severity of pun ishment that deters men from crime. If we know that we should positively die at fixed though far distant day, all of us would worry hourly about our approaching doom. Some of us would die long before our time from this very worry. All of us might reason that in the course of nature we should hardly live until that day; but, as 1t is, because the day of death is uncertain, not one of us lets the thought of it worry him. If it were law of nature that upon committing a murder or an infamous assault the offender would drop dead immediately thereafter, as a certain consequence, just as one must surely die If he shoots himself in a vital spot or takes poison, then indeed might death be to some extent de- terrent of crime. But under present conditions, death by punishment is no more imminent to him who commits a murder or assault than is his natural death. If he reflects at all, he expects to escape. Even if caught, he may be able to hire astute lawyers and go free through their efforts.
 There is a still stronger force at work to make death as punishment extremely uncertain. At the present age, men are by nature refined and averse to cruelty. So, when juror who before he was chosen has stated that he believes in capital punish ment, gets into the jury room after hearing the case, and begins to feel his awful responsibility, he is loath to im- pose the death penalty. As fact he does not impose it in many cases where under the letter of the law he is bound to.
 Moreover, undue sympathy is often excited for the criminal, and in many cases convictions are not secured at all. When death was the punishment in England for forging check of a certain amount, or stealing a certain sum of money, juries would usually find, in the very face of the evidence, that the stolen sum or the forged check was few cents below the fatal amount
 A punishment less than death, such as Imprisonment for life, without pow CT of pardon, can in the proper cases be much more easily enforced than the death penalty, as the statistics of the states that have abolished capital pun ishment prove. The death penalty Is for this reason, if no other, bound to go in time. It will become a dead let ter because of the reluctance of men to enforce 1t. And this reluctance will strengthen as they come to have bet ter conceptions of the real causes of crime.
 , No advocates of capital punishment would to-day defend 1t on the basis of revenge The sole defense of it at this day is that it is a deterrent of crime. But the deterrent argument is being knocked away by hard facts, and the advocates of capital punishment find themselves driven back to the prime val theory of bloody revenge. With most of them this is really the in 'stinctive basis of their belief in the gallows, although they usually deny 1t. But be their arguments and motives what they may, 1t is a confession of weakness to say that public security demands the death of any member of society.-The Public