The Atherstone, Nuneaton, and Warwickshire Times. — 1889-08-24 (Atherstone, Warwickshire, England)

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.  The Home Secretary has terminated the suspense with which Mrs. Maybrick' s fate was awaited, by advising Her Majesty to commute the death to one of penal servitude for life. We shall hardly be wrong in saying that his decision will be received by the large majority of the public with relief. In this we leave out of consideration the large number of people who shrink from contemplating the death of an attractive and outwardly refined woman upon the scaffold. This is an intelligible feeling, but it is one which no one is entitled to entertain who approves of capital punishment at all. If Mrs. Maybrick was guilty, she deserves to suffer the extreme punishment of the law as fully as any monster who is mentioned in the annals of murder. We speak rather of those who steel their hearts when they are firmly convinced of a pritoner's guilt, but who cannot endure the thought of inflicting an irrevocable sentence where suspicion falls short of certainty. The case against Mrs. Maybrick was and remains & case of terribly strong suspicion, but suspicion which, after all is said, just misses mortal certainty—The Times. Mr. Matthews's decision has at length been published, along with the reasons for it, and the general opinion will be that the decision, though illogical, is well enough, but that it was a mistake to give the reasons. Mr. Matthews is convinced that Mrs. Maybrick gave her husband poison, and gave it with intent to kill him, but he is not convinced that the poison was actually the cause of death. In other words, he brings Mrs. Maybrick in guilty of a new crime with which she was not charged. That is taking a liberal view of a Home Secretary's functions, and such a decision would of course have been infinitely more satisfactory if it had proceeded from a Court of Criminal Appeal. The line which separates Mr. Matthews's view from the view of the jury is confessedly a narrow one, and it is s curious form of reasoning which, given a certain effect, first asserts the existence of s cause adequate to produce it, and then declares that something else might have produced it after all. The conflict of medical testimony on which Mr. Matthews relies can be produced ad libitum in similar cases. There are almost always several possible causes of any given death, and if it is legitimate to ignor an adequate cause which did admittedly exist in order to seek other causes which may or may not have existed, there is an end of conviction on circumstantial evidence.— Manchester Guardian. As the case stands, Mrs. Maybrick has received that measure of justice which it is in human judgment to bestow. The suspicion under which she rests is too grave to warrant a reversal of the deliberate verdict of the jury. It falls short only of the conclusiveness which would fully warrant the death sentence. Her cane is full of sadness. If she is innocent, lifelong imprisonment is a dreadful fate. Severed from the children for whom she has wept so bitterly, cut off from the world which might still have granted her many pleasures, dishonoured and doubted—all this is a horrible penalty for adultery, although no more than adequate for murder. If she can be proved guiltless of that crime thousands would rejoice to see her released, and would pray that the trial through which she has passed may have purged the lesser moral guilt and fitted her to return to the children whom, with all her faults, she loves With an ardent mother's love. Birmingham Gazette. .  It may be—we cannot say—that the execution of the death-sentence upon this woman was necessary " for the protection of the good and the repression of the wicked." We are glad that the Home Secretary has judged otherwise; but, at any rate, she must be left to work out the punishmeet which mow remminia, xucl which, t:nible though it be, has been adjudged to her rather in mercy than in justioe.—Birminghani Post.