CHAPTER VIII

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, MURDER AND SUICIDE[28]

Murder, which is the summit of evil-doing according to human canons is at the same time the most natural act in the world. The so-called “unwritten law” which weighs up the evidence in favour of a man who kills his wife’s lover, is not without justice and a sense of fair play. In England, there is plenty of unwritten law, but it has nothing whatever to do with the _crime passionel_. However, if _A_ enters the bedroom of his wife and discovers this unfortunate woman with _B_, _in flagrante delicto_, to misuse an expression, and he shoots _B_ on the spot, he stands a very good chance of escaping the supreme punishment of the law. But if _A_, on seeing his wife in the act of adultery with _B_, leaves the room, goes downstairs, obtains possession of his revolver, and then returns to kill _B_, the position is somewhat different. This particular example supplies evidence of _mens rea_, or criminal intent. _A_ is not acting in a spontaneous fashion, for he deliberately goes away and then returns, with murder in his mind. In a good many parts of the world, either way would be justifiable, and, one must admit, with some reason.

There is nothing more far-reaching than adultery in a married woman. Her future offspring may not be that of her husband, and, at best, he believes her body to be tainted with a poisonous contact. The real idea of marriage is to keep one woman exclusively for one man, by whom it is intended she should fulfil the functions of maternity. To have suspicion of outside intercourse is to destroy everything which is most profound in the union.

It is usual to divorce a wife who commits adultery, in England: to kill her lover and to ostracise her from her home are methods left to other races.

In America, the Thaw case, which attracted more interest than the facts deserved, was treated in an ultra-civilized manner. Perhaps, if the events associated with this _cause célèbre_ had taken place in another State of the Union the results would have been different. It is true that the relations between Thaw’s wife and White, the murdered man, had not been resumed after the marriage, though the incidents immediately preceding the shooting at Madison Square Garden should have gone a long way towards saving Thaw. Thaw was dining at the Café Martin, a well-known restaurant something after the type of the Café de la Paix. His wife, the former victim of White, was with him. White entered the restaurant and proceeded to make offensive remarks from an adjacent table. Thaw, no doubt excited by alcohol, was very properly incensed. Later on, after the incident had preyed on his mind, he pulled out his revolver and shot White dead. This was at the Madison Square Roof-Garden. If White had not made offensive remarks at the expense of Thaw and his wife at the Café Martin, it is most improbable that any shooting would have occurred. But what with Thaw’s knowledge of White’s intimacy with the girl in her early days, and the fact that the offender used it as a taunt in a public place, there is little wonder that the _dénouement_ was murder. The strict critic may say that Thaw should not have made such a marriage.

The instinct to kill in a man confronted by another who has been intimate with the woman who became his wife must be very strong,

## particularly among heated temperaments. It is not necessary,

one may perhaps assume, to have “brain storms,” paranoia, or incipient insanity, to produce the exact state of mind, under given circumstances, which prompted the shooting at Madison Square Garden. One somehow feels that injustice has been done the “murderer” by stamping him with the brand of lunacy. It was the only alternative, however, as the case went, to the electric chair.

The system of electrocution, meted out to murderers in the State of New York, is about as bad, or even worse, than hanging, with which it is intended to deal briefly in the present chapter. There is nothing to be said against capital punishment, at least on the part of anyone who has examined the question in practice, but hanging as the means is an antiquated survival of the witchcraft age (though one vaguely remembers that “witches” were burnt!).

The French guillotine is a cumbersome contrivance, involving the employment of an expert manipulator, with trained assistants, and impedimenta. In Germany, where the executioner wields an axe, there is the possibility of an absence of precision which fails to recommend the method. Quite a dramatic scene was witnessed at the execution of a female poisoner in the Kaiser’s dominions the other day. The story suggested a Sanscullotic (Carlyle is responsible for the word!) outrage of the French Terror. No, the executioner with the axe is a poor way of fulfilling the last rites of the law.

If the Kneller portrait of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, painted after execution, is faithful, the executioner was singularly adroit with his axe. But the use of the axe depends too much on personal dexterity in the evasion of the atrocious. As an institution it is, therefore, to be condemned. Hanging, on the other hand, has the Lee case as a perpetual warning against it. (It will be remembered that a murderer named Lee would not “hang.” He ultimately had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, from which, as an anomaly of the law, he emerged in good health, after serving some twenty years.) It is elaborate, and anything elaborate, in respect of such a matter as the death penalty, savours of anachronism. Of course, there is some traditional or legendary nonsense about the ignominy of hanging as opposed to execution by the axe, but humanly enforced death is as bad in one form as in another so far as the victim goes, so that the argument hardly impresses one with its strength. Then, too, the whole scheme is barbarous in practice; not that the would-be murderer is more deterred by the fear of hanging than he would be by the fear of death from a volley of muskets, but the machinery necessary for carrying out a death sentence by hanging is out-of-date, crude, and not compatible with the advance of the times. By far the simplest, cheapest, most effective, worthy means of supporting the majesty of the law in its supreme act of retribution is by the shooting of murderers on the day set for execution. Half a dozen soldiers, drafted from the nearest barracks, could be ordered to fire a volley at the condemned man in the prison yard, or in any other place convenient to the authorities. The inclusion of soldiers need not necessarily be a stumbling-block. Armed prison warders, with some substantial idea of the uses of a gun, would fulfil the same purpose. Death, to the condemned man, would be just as humane in the abruptness of its arrival as the “six foot drop” (or whatever prison parlance and the height of the victim make it). The only good thing about hanging is its comparative cleanliness. That is to say, there is not a deluge of blood from the person hanged, as there is in the case of one decapitated. That is all very well, but death from a volley of muskets does not produce the effects associated with a slaughter-house, either.

Hanging is little less ridiculous than the Chinese custom of walling-in a parricide with masonry, air-holed to delay death. Indeed, it is no more appropriate to modern ideas than death from the Tarpeian Rock would be. It is quite inconceivable that the rope should have stood firm as an instrument of execution as long as it has. In the days, not so far back (as recently as 1868), when hanging was carried out in public, it had a certain awe-inspiring influence on the ignorant mind. But now that the death penalty is executed within prison walls, the quickest, easiest, and least complicated method must inevitably recommend itself as the best. Death by the volley of muskets should take an easy lead, at any rate over hanging. To pinion a man, to stand him against a wall, and to order a handful of troops to fire, are acts simple and certain in their effect. Advance arrangements become unnecessary. The boxing and burial of the dead body are no different, after such an episode, than the boxing and burial after a criminal has been hanged. The removal of the evidence of taking blood is a detail. As a concession to the _soi-disant_ humanitarian, blindfolding could be adopted to ameliorate the condition of the condemned.

The writer is no violent antagonist to hanging; he is merely of opinion that it could be superseded with some advantage, chiefly because the formula is based upon an antiquated conception of punishment, which does not seem to him to be as promising as the simple method of shooting down the condemned criminal.

A paragraph of some interest may be taken from the current press. It is headed, _Optional Suicide: Choice for Murderers_, and it runs as follows: “A novel law providing an alternative to hanging for murderers on whom the death sentence has been passed was presented to-day to the Nevada Legislature. It sets forth that any person about to suffer capital punishment, may, if he pleases, swallow a dose of hydrocyanic acid. The new law was framed by a Code Commission, partly as the result of the difficulty in finding an official executioner in Nevada. The officers of the law, it seems, have frequently objected of late to figuring in executions, on the ground that though the death sentence is provided by the law, they are in fact guilty of voluntarily bringing about death. The members of the Code Commission, therefore, adopted a suggestion based on the cup of hemlock drunk by Socrates. If the new law is passed by the legislature, condemned murderers, after the sentence has been pronounced, will be allowed in future immediately to designate the method of death they prefer. Ten minutes before the time appointed for execution, a physician will visit the prisoner in his cell and hand him (or her) a packet of poison, and explain its effect and the proper way of taking it. The Bill sets forth that on the receptacle containing the poison it shall be plainly written: ‘There is contained herein a sufficient quantity of hydrocyanic acid to cause instantaneous death. You are authorised to take the same for the purpose of carrying into execution the sentence of death heretofore legally pronounced against you.’ It is further provided that ‘if the defendant, after having elected to take the hydrocyanic acid, shall fail or refuse to take the same, he shall forthwith be hanged by the neck until he is dead.’ The majority of the Legislature are reported to favour the Bill as framed by the Code Commission.”

The alternative of suicide given to the person under death sentence does not recommend itself to English ideas. The sensibility of “the officers of the law” in Nevada should be remedied by an infusion of new blood. It is noticeable that the suicide suggestion is an alternative to hanging, which appears to be the form usual in the State of Nevada. Perhaps, the execution by a volley of muskets would appeal to the requirements of the Nevada Legislature?[29] Particularly, as the shooting could be done by the soldiery, or by marksmen other than “officers of the law.”

Where several persons fire at one and the same time, it is practically impossible to say which one is responsible for the shot which actually causes death in the person fired upon. This ignorance has often helped to soothe the soldier of sensitive conscience when, with others, he has had to obey the order to fire on a spy or other person liable to death under martial law. This indirectly suggests one of the most curious possibilities of legal inadequacy. What is the position of a soldier ordered by his officer to fire on a mob? Metaphorically, he is between the devil and the deep sea. If he fires on the mob, he may be called upon to account for his act to a civil tribunal, and thus be found guilty of murder and hanged. While, on the other hand, if he does not fire upon the mob, when so ordered by his officer, he may be tried by court martial and shot!

To turn from murder to suicide and attempted suicide, much suggests itself as anomalous and even absurd in the laws and customs of England in this connection. There is an element of farce in the arrest, detention and prosecution of some wretched man or woman who has unsuccessfully endeavoured to escape from life.[30] Suicide attracts numberless persons, excited by neurotic impulses. Sometimes a woman, _enceinte_ and deserted by her lover, throws herself into a canal or into the river. A man guilty of misappropriation, on the verge of having his misdeed discovered, takes poison, shoots himself or tries to jump in front of a railway train. If the poison comes up, if the shot is inaccurate, or if there is a pit of salvation between the railway metals, the would-be suicide may find himself before a magistrate the next morning, with a burly policeman as his accuser. A well-meant anomaly. When it has run its course, the accused may be proceeded against by the person who has suffered through his act of misappropriation. There are women who in moments of pique or unreasoning rage, do away with themselves, largely because they cannot conveniently vent it upon the cause of their discomfiture. Among women-servants of inferior type, there is a tendency to commit suicide because of some faithless lover, or other cause. These misguided creatures generally first write a pathetic letter, disjointedly stating their grievances, with the full confidence that it will be published in the newspapers of the Sunday following the inquest. This strange vanity throws a pitiful ray on the phases of the ignorant mind. Of course, suicides are not confined to the lower or intermediate classes, but they are more generally found among persons whose lot is not alleviated by fortune or gentle birth.

Suicide is not always incomprehensible, though the coroner’s jury, with its constant verdict, “during temporary insanity,” would seem to make it so. There are plenty of people afflicted by disease, medical men among them, who cut their throats or shoot themselves in desperate resignation. For purposes of convenience, they are described as of unsound mind by the considerate jury. Admittedly, an individual who takes his own life is, _primâ facie_, unbalanced--the act indicates it. Then, too, physical disease, which has preyed upon a man’s health until his judgment has become warped, produces a form of _quasi_-insanity. The suicide verdict, “whilst of unsound mind,” may also be agreeable to surviving relatives and persons with claims against insurance companies, but, strictly speaking, its accuracy is generally doubtful, unless a “warped” mental state, hysteria in women, and the product of the goadings of misfortune, are symptoms of definite insanity. If this is so, there are few people in the land who approximate “sanity.” Of course, in subjects who advance to the length of suicide the defects specified have reached the stage of personal dominion, or, under another name, _idée fixe_, in an acute form. This may technically justify the insanity verdict, but it is questionable whether anything else would, if one makes allowance for class and ignorance.

By the same process, the man who is goaded into theft by sheer hunger must likewise be insane. His misfortunes have produced the hunger and the hunger the theft. Thus desperation is often forced upon a man by want of funds, something which means prospective, if not immediate, hunger, and the sense of desperation in its most active state brings about suicide. Whitaker Wright, the convicted felon, committed suicide to escape a term of penal servitude. He had a reasonable, if not a justifiable, motive for his act. So far as one remembers, off-hand, no “temporary insanity” verdict was recorded in his case. Its balsamic effect is, however, demanded in countless instances where suicides have been prompted by equally explainable motives. Altogether, the coroner’s jury’s verdict, of “suicide whilst of unsound mind,” is generally inconsistent with the actual facts which led to the act of self-destruction.

But the greatest anomaly of all in relation to the verdicts of coroners’ juries is the murder verdict at an inquest. Why should a perfectly irresponsible body, for a coroner’s jury _is_ an irresponsible body in deciding the guilt of an accused murderer, find _A_ guilty of the wilful murder of his wife _B_ before the Grand Jury[31] has even found a true bill against _A_? The practice is utterly absurd. (It may be said here, in parenthesis, that it seems a waste of public money to carry on a police court prosecution and proceedings before the coroner in connection with the same murder charge. It should be noted that an accused person can be committed for trial on the coroner’s warrant, though it is usual for the police magistrate to do the committing.) It will be remembered that the notorious Crippen case occupied the attention of a coroner and his jury for some little time. There, certain fleshy remains found buried in the cellar of a house in an outlying district of London, formed the subject of the inquiry. It was alleged that they were portions of a woman’s body. No bones were discovered by the police, and a good deal of speculation was rife as to fixing the flesh with the hall-mark of identity. It was admitted from the outset that the flesh in question was human flesh, but beyond this a difficult task seemed to lay before the authorities. It was made less irksome by the presence of an operation scar, which turned out to have been on the body of Crippen’s wife. The coroner’s jury ultimately found that the flesh was the flesh of Cora Crippen, _alias_ “Belle Elmore,” and that H. H. Crippen, formerly her husband, was guilty of her wilful murder. There was no reasonable doubt as to the accused man’s guilt from the first. He had carried on a practice as a medical quack, and in the course of his business had employed a typist, Ethel Le Neve, or Neave, with whom he cohabited. The Crippen woman disappeared somewhat suddenly; inquiries were then set on foot by her friends to ascertain the truth, which the husband failed to supply. Soon after receiving a visit from a police-inspector, H. H. Crippen himself disappeared, and it was only after frantic efforts had been made that the man was discovered to be on board a vessel in mid-Alantic. Accompanied by his mistress, he then fell an easy prey to his pursuers--after half Europe had been searched for him in vain. The murder of which he was accused was a peculiarly atrocious one. After poisoning his victim, he had deliberately set his

## partial knowledge of anatomy to account by dismembering the corpse,

disposing of the bones and secreting the flesh. The man’s remarkable nerve, employed in a legitimate channel, might have made him successful in life, instead of making him the object of a hue-and-cry from St. Petersburg to San Francisco. The story in detail, is newspaper history.

To return to the legal side of the matter, which has numerous less notorious parallels, Crippen had been found guilty of the wilful murder of his wife in the coroner’s court, though he had not yet been tried by any jury qualified by law to convict him of the crime. To point out a further anomaly, _i.e._, the fiction that an accused person is assumed to be innocent until proved guilty, it may be argued that up to the time of his trial at the Central Criminal Court, Crippen was technically an innocent man, though he had already been found guilty of wilful murder by an unauthorised body of jurors! Such a hopelessly inconsistent state of affairs is grotesque in this country which is held up as a pattern of justice and legal perfection generally. Of course, in the Crippen case there was no sort of doubt whatever as to the accused’s guilt; the case is here quoted because it may be fresher in the public mind than many other cases, which portray similarly anomalous features. At some trials, jurors are subjected to downright inconvenience with a view to preventing their contact with prejudicial persons or prints. In the Crippen case, the members of the Old Bailey jury may reasonably have been expected to see newspaper reports dealing with the verdict of the coroner’s jury. If they did so read the information contained in these reports, they knew that Crippen had already been _found guilty_ of the wilful murder of his wife, Cora Crippen, a crime for which they were about to try him. Truly enough, Crippen was convicted of murder at the Old Bailey, on evidence of a remarkably satisfactory character, taking into consideration the complexity of the original clues. But though this is in fact the case, there is no gainsaying the grossness of the system which permits a man to be publicly found guilty of a terrible offence for which he has not yet even been tried.

The coroner’s jury’s verdict of “wilful murder” should be relegated to ancient history in these practical times when precision and definity rule all things. A coroner’s office gains no lustre by submitting its holder to the satirical function of hearing verdicts which are not verdicts in law or practice, but which, nevertheless, are liable to confuse the ignorant mind and to do harm where good is intended. It should be remembered that jurors are not as a rule drawn from a class of original thinkers, persons, that is to say, who are intellectually trained to discriminate--to judge for themselves. Even if they were, the existing custom of allowing a murder verdict to be returned before a case goes for trial is both prejudicial and improper.

FOOTNOTES

[28] See Appendix D.

[29] Some such scheme appears to have been adopted since this chapter was written.

[30] “No fewer than four persons were charged at Marylebone police-court this afternoon with attempted suicide.

“The first was a domestic servant, who was found lying in the road, having taken poison.

“The Rev. Mr. Shaw, of Dulwich, said she had been in his service sixteen months, but left a week ago to enter the service of the sister of a great friend of hers. The situation was a great disappointment to her, however, for ‘she was accustomed to be in rather refined service,’ and she complained that she was unable to wear any of her new frocks. The result was that she left, and her great friend had thrown her over; hence her position in the dock.

“Mr. Paul Taylor remanded her, saying he had never known a woman to attempt suicide for less adequate reasons.

“The other defendants were men. Two were remanded, and the third was discharged, as he denied that he wanted to kill himself--he bought the laudanum found on him for his teeth.”--_Current Evening Paper._

[31] Reference to Grand Juries reminds one that the late Mr. Justice Stephen (Sir James Fitz-James Stephen) “expressed his inability to understand why a man should be presumed to be innocent when a Grand Jury have sworn that they thought him guilty.” (Mr. A. T. Carter, D.C.L.) It has been pointed out to the writer, by the way, that the members of a Grand Jury sometimes throw out a bill, because, “Otherwise, what are we here for?” In other words, without applying any very special discrimination, they take upon themselves a function opposed to the expert judgment of the committing magistrate, who has heard all the evidence.

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