The Express. — 1860-04-10 (London, England)

PETTED MURDERERS.  In referring to the proceedings preliminary to the execution at Bedford of Jana Cagle, be the murder of his wife, the isrffeed Mawr, says e We publish the details forlekramee doalteks tastagainet the treatment murderer experienced at the hands Ttholt"Y. wises tody he was placed It is long since we have read so thoroughly disgusting as the record of the daily this petted inmate of • condemned cell. We have ahoy, been opponents of the punishment of death, on the ground that it is unauthorised, brutal, brutalising, and undone ; but if we had ever looked with favour on the gallows as a social defence or • moral teacher, our faith in ite edlesey would have been shattered by the arguments which aro pesseated in the treatment of Castle. Here was • min coevided of the murderof his wife under eircunistances of extreme atrocity. The crime was not the result of sudden passion : the murdered woman was not struck down by an angry Wow which did injury beyond the intent of him who delivered it ; nor weir the crime regretted. The murder was dabs rate, premeditated ; and from the time of its conusimica to the last moment of life the law allowed him the murderer had no thought except for himself. While he bed yet days to live, he was only intent on what he should alit and drink, and selfishly and morosely sensitive if the pleasures his sensual appetite demanded were not famished on the instant, and without objection. Even when his sands were nearly run out, and while the hammer was yet ringing upon the bolts of the gallows, he was solicitous ante about himself. He had no regret., and experienced no repestence, so far as the report discloses. For hiss= sleeping the sleep of death in the bloody he had wrought for her with guilty hands, he had no sorrow. She seems rarely to have occurred I. his mind ; and the heinousness of his guilt appears to have been wholly unfelt. He grew restless Uswards the last, but give utterance to the language of tenor rather than of yid and self-abasement. But this phase pawed away, sad when the hour appointed for the execution drew so neer that the unexpired minutes might be molly counted, and the decent feeling of the °facials wog'sited that the man who was appointed to die should be roomed from his slumbers to confront the awfulness of loo.position—the murderer petitioned for • little more slp ke thesssi.* ores his saaind " is not for us to question that in his Wert moments better thoughts were given to him ; or that hope, who never Mrs her golden gates, opened them to him fis his extremity—if perchance the self-seeking man, de the dread tumult of the death-hour, sought pease through repsetarice. Our object is—without repeating the recital which appears elsewhere—to indicate the fact that throughout his imprisonment and after his condemnation, Castle was brutally sensual, and selfishly indifferent to everything except the gratification of his appetite, and to his own personal danger; and that it was upon this man the officials of the gaol lavished their sympathy and regards in such • manner as to make condemnation to death rather a thing to be desired than avoided by that class of morbid egotists which furnishes ne with murderers and suicides. It naturally suesesta itself to one's mind as most proper in the case of a murderer that, after his condemnation, whether he he sentenced to be hung or to be imprisoned, as little notice should be taken of him as possible. He should receive the prison allowance of food, and the visits of the chaplinn. For all else he had better be kept out of sight and out at Wad. It is utterly revolting that • man convicted of the worst of crimes should be feasted and petted, tai his mind is overwhelmed with • sense of his own importanos. There is no conceivable reason why we should feel more interest in the murderer than in the pickpocket, whom we relentlessly consign to hard fare, the treadwheel, and forgetfulness—really nothing, except the fact that he is doomed to die. That probably is the explanation, and In itself constitutes a strong argument against a punishment which devel men in • gaoler, the kind of sympathy which boardops,echool girls used to feel for the villains of the sickly romances they read. But while the penalty of death remains, let us summon to our assistance enough of common sense, if not of hardness, to carry the law into effect with as much dignity and decency as is possible under the circumstances. Let us cease to fatten  murderers for the gallows as oxen for market, and to conciliate their humours by them the option of reset fowl, or beef and plum-p . Justice should be stern, though not cruel ; and she makes one doubt whether she be not • counterfeit,when she unites the functions of the restaurateur with those of the executioner. Certainly, much harm is done by the imprudent sympathy of her minister for those whom she has doomed to die the death ; and, perhaps, the Beechwood tragedy, so closely following on the heels of the disclosures of the discipline observed in the county gaol at Bedford, may to some extent have been caused by them. To desperate men, foiled in their unlawful pursuits, and with the fear of • renewal of vulgar imprisonment before them, the honours accorded to Castle, and the observation concentrated upon him, may have been too powerful • provocative to crime, which being as henious, ought be regarded as entitling them to equal indulgence, and to a similar ovation.  WIFOLDIALZ SWINDLING a?