The Sun. — 1863-12-30 (London, England)

DOLT, WEDNESDAY, DEC. 30, 1863.  The aeei . sion arrived at by the right hon. the :Home St.to tary, in regard to the wretched criminal TowNixe ' appears to us to be one likely to prove in the highest degree alarming in its consequences. • As constituting ,„t itself, now that it has been definitively announced a fearful precedent ,it holds out a frightful prospect (like Towei7f immunity to any future criminals 1.1) of the blackest dye well imaginable. A more brutal, a more dastardly murder—a murder more deliberately done in cold blood—than that perpetrated by the hands of this miserable man • owhere to be found mentioned among all the cruel deeds recorded in the Ne wgEkte Calendar. The murderer, GEORGE VICTOR Towel Ley, a mani of education, a man even of ability, and, op to the date of his crime, enjoying among those who vas w him a reputation for refinement, though the deed, ,t blood itself proved the refinement to be only a tetoe, merit of cruelty—has, by what appears to na amour weak concession on the part of the authorities, answer to a maudlin local clamour for a respite, been allowed to escape from the penalties of the law, to the weight of which he had been most justly declared to have rendered himself amenable. It is not that we would be understood to be here arguing in any way out of a sanguinary yearning to see vengeance done upon this wretched man, according to the old pitiless dispensation of the Mosaic code—wherein an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life, each in its turn, was, as a rule, regarded as indispensable. All we are here desirous of insisting upon, in the instance of this educated assassin, this gentle murderer, is that while other condemned convicts are brought to the gallows and inexorably hung by the neck there until they are dead, for deeds of blood in no way worse of their kind, in no wey done ,itt, • more atrocious deliberation, justice should not be Outraged by the flag= inconsistency of allowing this 3 perpetrator of a crime of double bleakness and triple infamy to escape from a punishment to which lesser criminals are, as already insisted upon, pitilessly doomed to lie the death. The particulars of ToweeE.i.B crime need here no sort of recapitulation. It was a murder as coolly thought out and planned 88 any murder that was ever perpetrated, previously to the date of its perpetration, not a suspicion, had been entertained in regard to the tiara_ of the man now declared to be non corn/Jos mends, a criminal lanatie, a homicidal monomaniac. Hie eonteluct upon the occasion of the murder never gave 'let one who saw him, or spoke with him, an impreissiet, that he was deranged. Throughout his loaf and  J  atient trial by a jury of his fellow-countrymen— ionest, intelligent, and impartial Englishmen (we at least may be allowed to speak of them thus, seeing that the trial is long since over, and that we never had any brief in this case confided to us)—honest, intelligent, impartial Englishmen, who were sworn to do this miserable man justice— throughout the whole of the long and patient trial of TOWNLEY for the murder of Miss GOODWIN, we say, the jury were in no way brought to believe, nor yet was the judge upon the bench who directed the verdict, and who pronounced the sentence, led to believe, that the prisoner at the bar was an irresponsible agent—that he was mad, or at any rate so far touched with madness as to be irresponsible. After the trial has been completed, after the verdict has been delivered in by the jury, after the sentence of death has been pronounced upoa the condemned criminal by the lips of the Judge, then, but not until then, a morbid agitation is set on foot in the county tainted by his presence, an agitation most morbid of its kind, as it ap, pears to us, the promoters of which agitation are bent upon persuading the authorities to do for this man of education, this reputed gentleman of refinement, what it would be utterly preposterous to have attempted doing for an illiterate mechanic or a hornyhanded agricultural labourer. The endeavour has been just now successfuly carried out. Miss GOODWIN'S murderer has received a respite. Commissioners of lunacy have examined into the state of the mind of