The Blackpool Herald. — 1879-08-15 (Blackpool, Lancashire, England)

THE HERALD  BLACKPOOL, FRIDAY, AUGUST 15,1879.  THE days of capital punishment are apparently fast drawing to a close. Home Secretaries, juries, High Sheriffs, and governors of prisons, are all combining, unwittingly perhaps, to hasten on the time when Calcrafts and Marwoods will no longer have need to discuss the comparative merits of a six foot or eight foot drop. However strongly and frequently the charge may be denied, the fact still remains that when it comes to the infliction of the death punishment a cslprit stands an exceedingly good chance of escaping the dread penalty if only .he possesses influential friends. The case of Mainwairing is one in point. As soon as the judge who tried the murderer of Moss the policeman, opened his month to pronounce sentence of death, it was understood that the sentence was only a formal one. The murderer was well connected, and I although he had killed an unoffending fellow-creature, without provocstion, yet his was a case in which the Home Secretary has now announced that there never was any, intention of carrying out the full sentence. The story of the jury having "tossed up" for a chairman has aided the Rome Secretary I in finding an excuse for commutation, and the matter is now as good as settled. Far I be it from us to suggest that a sentence of death should in all cases be carried out; but for the sake of consistency and the fame of justice in this country, capital punishment ! should be abolished in all cases, when it has come to this that authorities decide as they have done in the case of Mainwairing. In several ways the decision of the authorities in this case will have a demoralising and pernicious effect. It cannot now but be taken for granted that the fact of a man being "drunk and disorderly" at the time he commits a murder will be taken into account as an "extenuating circumstance" on his trial, especially if he has influential friends. In future we shall probably hear of more murders then ever being committed under the influence of drink. Mainwairing's case will be taken as a precedent. A passionate brute, mad with drunk, will scarcely hesitate at murder, for be will have good reason for thinking that any rate he will escape the gallows. Still the whole blame for miscarriages of justice in the cases of convicts sentenced to be hung should not be laid to the charge of class-influence intervening. Juries ape loth to convict on a capital charge. On the slightest excuse they " rednce " the charge from murder to manslaughter. They care to have no hand in the shedding of possibly innocent blood. Were capital punishment abolished, there would be fewer murderers escape than is at present the case. Another reason why the punishment should be abolished lies in the fact that recently the authorities have decided to carry out the sentence of the law in so secret a mode that the country fails altogether to have any knowledge of, and consequently no dontrol over, what might happen to be instances of deplorable blundering at the drop. It frequently happened, even when criminals were done to death in the public gaze, that the rope broke, or the drop was too short, or something or other occurred which caused unnecessary suffering to the doomed victims. The public, since the authorities took to excluding representatives of the Press, have no guarantee that horrible scenes do not occur on the scaffold. In the presence of the public, or the Press, there was the likelihood that functionaries of the law would take reasonable care against blundering. Now hangmen or warders may blunder as they like; for only half-a-dozen persons, and all of them liable to censure, I know of the circumstances, and are sure to , gloss them over, or misstate details, in order to keep things comfortably quiet. In America, private executions are carried out in a very different fashion to what they are in England. Not only are representatives of the Press permitted to stand at the foot of the gallows for the purpose of affording the public independent statements of the proceedings, but all the prisoners in gaol at the time are placed round the scaffold in order