Fiend

by Harold Schechter

  Were half the time that’s spent condemning sin,

  Were half the money spent for man’s conviction,

  Given, freely given, the erring ones to win

  To virtue’s path, by kindness, benediction,

  This hanging by the neck till you are dead,

  This cool, deliberate murder by judicial power,

  From sight of which sweet Mercy hides her head,

  This licensed crime could scarcely live an hour.

  The gallows tree would be a thing unknown,

  And prisons would be swept from earth ere long

  For lack of convicts; and the “Golden rule”

  Would be the burden of the nation’s song.

  To the opponents of commutation, however, people like Wetmore and Robinson were nothing more than bleeding hearts. “Let us have some Spartan justice,” demanded a gentleman named Kittredge, “even if sentimentalists do look with horror on it and set up their imbecile cry.” Another man, Hubert Radclyffe, concurred with this opinion, decrying the “persisent efforts of the sentimentalists who are petitioning for clemency. . . . If the young fiend POMEROY be allowed to live, he may get out of prison and exercise upon men and women his barbarous appetite to inflict torture. No, the Governor must in this case do what is best for the community, regardless of all sentimentality.”

  As for the argument that it was immoral to send a fourteen-year-old boy to the gallows, various writers scoffed at the notion. “Why recommend the Pomeroy boy to mercy?” asked one typically indignant citizen. “O, he is so young, is he? He is not so young, not of so tender years as the babes whom he brutalized and did to death. He was old enough to show that he knew he was doing wrong. Besides abundant evidence at the trial, the jury of the verdict shows that. For if not so, he should have been found not guilty. The verdict of guilty settles the question of responsibility.” According to this writer, the jury—though correct in its verdict—had overstepped its legal bounds in making its recommendation:

  Juries have no right, as such, to recommend to mercy. Our whole system of political government and of the dispensing of justice is constructed upon the principle of a division of duties and powers assigned to different departments. Each department should keep within its own lines. Juries are to find and truly say whether the criminal is guilty or not guilty, under the law as stated by the Court. Said the old form of administering the oath to jurors, “If you find him guilty you will say so, and say no more.” The recommendation to mercy is an unwarranted assumption of power. It ought to be treated as, in law, it is—a nullity.

  Some of the letters in support of Jesse’s execution took on an actively threatening tone. “There is one thing and but one that will insure your reelection,” a Boston man named A. C. Bradley wrote to Gaston, whose term had less than a year to run, “and that is the signing of the death warrant of young Pomeroy. The contest will be close and such action will turn wavering votes in sufficient number to insure your victory. Neglect action in regard to the young murderer and you are defeated.”

  Bostonians weren’t the only ones to get caught up in the controversy. Indeed, letters poured into the governor’s office from all over the country—a sign of the far-flung notoriety that the Pomeroy case had achieved. Some were appeals to the governor’s conscience, like the brief but fervent note from James Lindsley of Nashville, Tennessee: “You cannot sign this death warrant with the New Testament before you and believing in Christianity. O, temper justice with mercy which endureth all things.”

  Others, like a letter from Dr. W. A. Mansfield of Winfield, Kansas, addressed the issue of Jesse’s sanity:

  I see by the papers that Jesse Pomeroy, the boy murderer, is found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. In view of the mental condition of the culprit, I trust the Governor of the great and enlightened state of Massachusetts will never lend himself to such an inhuman transaction, for the boy is clearly an irresponsible being. Every medical man who has paid attention to diseases of the brain and the history of this unfortunate as revealed in the papers cannot fail to see that he is subject to periodic attacks of monomania. In the name of everything that is good and great, save this mentally deranged boy from so horrible a death.

  And then there were those who—like their counterparts in Boston—cried out for Pomeroy’s blood. From Maine, for example, came a letter denouncing opponents of the death sentence as dangerous “sentimentalists”—the same misguided “class of people” who had been responsible for Jesse’s early parole from reform school. Through their “meddlesome interference,” the “juvenile wretch was let loose upon the community and enabled to perpetrate all these atrocious crimes.” Now, these same “sympathetic friends of the murderer” were out to “repeat their work” by securing Jesse’s pardon. Speaking on behalf of the “friends of law and order,” the writer urged the governor to heed the fears of the “wives and mothers of Boston” by ensuring that “the butcherer of little children never again be turned loose upon their little ones.”

  * * *

  The efforts to influence Governor Gaston’s decision weren’t limited to letter-writing. For months, the governor’s office was besieged by citizens from throughout Massachusetts, bearing dozens of petitions opposing or supporting the death sentence. Just a few days before the March meeting was to be held, for example, a delegation of women representing the “Mothers, Sisters, and Daughters of the Town and County of Nantucket” delivered a petition to Gaston, pleading for “executive clemency in the case of Jesse Pomeroy.”

  “We feel,” read the petition, “that although the crime committed may seem to call loudly for the severest rigor of the law, yet the youth of the culprit and the humanitarian view of a future reform under the enlightened sanitary system of correction, prompt us to desire that his sentence may be commuted to imprisonment for life.” At least a dozen similar documents—some containing as many as 900 signatures—were presented to the governor during the late winter and early spring of 1875.

  A nearly identical number of petitions demanding Jesse’s execution were circulated during the same period. These included petitions from the Ladies of Chelsea (153 signatures); Boston Citizens (45 signatures); Parents and Citizens of Boston (146 signatures); Citizens of East Boston (56 signatures); Wives, Mothers, and Daughters of East Boston (219 signatures); Parents and Citizens of South Boston (265 signatures); Citizens, Women, and Parents of South Boston (75 signatures); Ladies and Citizens of South Boston (856 signatures); Ladies and Parents of Chelsea (127 signatures); Citizens of Acton, Massachusetts (49 signatures); Parents and Citizens of Malden (150 signatures); and Citizens of Cambridge (528 signatures).

  * * *

  The bitter division in public sentiment—between the advocates of mercy and proponents of death—was mirrored in the governor’s council chamber. Governor Gaston, a distinguished, fifty-five-year-old jurist who had served two terms as mayor of Boston, felt utterly appalled (like everyone else) at the enormity of Jesse’s crimes. But—having determined that, in the entire history of New England, the youngest person ever hanged was an eighteen-year-old killer from Maine back in the 1830s—he was hesitant to send a fourteen-year-old boy to the gallows. (Partly as a result of the Pomeroy controversy, the law regarding condemned prisoners would ultimately be changed in Massachusetts, making it the responsibility of the Court to set the date of execution; in 1875, however, that responsibility still rested with the governor.)

  Standing in adamant opposition to Gaston was his lieutenant governor, Horatio G. Knight, a vigorous supporter of the death penalty. The eight-man council was split directly in half, four of the members strongly in favor of commutation, the rest as staunchly opposed.

  On March 31, 1875, the scheduled hearing was held before Governor Gaston and his council. Speaking on behalf of the prisoner, Charles Robinson urged that the death sentence be commuted to imprisonment for life on the grounds of Jesse’s youth and irresponsibility. The prosecution, represented by Attorney General Train, vehemently argued against su
ch action and called for the execution of Pomeroy in accordance with the law.

  Averse to signing Jesse’s death warrant—and faced with a hopelessly divided council—Gaston refrained from taking any definitive action. Instead, he called for a public hearing in two weeks’ time, to allow the citizens of Massachusetts to vent their feelings on the matter before the governor, his councillors, and the world.

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  The force of the popular feeling in this case rests upon one of the strongest of our animal instincts: that which prompts to the defense of our offspring. The parent who finds the wolf waiting to ambush his little ones may slay the beast. Not so the parent who discovers a Pomeroy in like ambush. The majesty of the law must be invoked. . . . The law’s penalty must be executed upon this the most dangerous criminal who ever drew breath within the bounds of our fair Commonwealth.

  —Plea to the governor, April 13, 1875

  The friends and foes of commutation turned out in force for the public hearing on Tuesday, April 13. Men and women from throughout New England flocked to the State House to hear their spokesmen plead for Jesse Pomeroy’s life or urge his execution. At precisely 9:00 A.M.—with the spectator section of the Green Room filled to capacity—Governor Gaston, Lieutenant Governor Knight, and all eight members of the council filed into the chamber. A few moments later, the proceedings got underway.

  The petitioners for commutation testified first, with Charles Robinson, Jr., making the opening address. Though he was there, he insisted, “not as a lawyer so much as a private citizen who knows more about young Pomeroy than anyone else,” Robinson’s hour-long speech was essentially a summary of the arguments he had set forth at the trial. He spoke of the “childhood disorders” that “had seriously affected Jesse’s temperament.” He described the “mania for cruelty” that had manifested itself by the time Jesse was four or five years old—the unnatural pleasure the little boy derived from “torturing small animals.”

  “In school,” Robinson continued, Jesse had “shown a total lack of feeling, caring nothing about punishment and being not at all improved in any way thereby.” Nor had he ever “displayed the least remorse” for the killings of Horace Millen and Katie Curran. All these facts—along with the sheer senselessness and atrocity of the murders (which Robinson reviewed in graphic detail)—proved beyond dispute that young Pomeroy was insane.

  The two expert witnesses who had testified for the defense—Drs. John Tyler and Clement Walker—spoke next. They, too, gave an abridged version of the points they had made at the trial. Jesse, they agreed, was of “good mental ability” but “morally insane.” This combination of sound intelligence and diseased morality made him a “very dangerous person to the community,” which needed to protect itself from “any further acts of violence.” Since young Pomeroy was not responsible for his acts, however, he should not be subjected to the death penalty. Rather, he ought to be imprisoned for life—“shut away forever,” as Walker put it.

  This view was supported by several other psychiatrists, including Dr. Theodore W. Fisher, the examining physician at the Boston Lunatic Asylum. According to Fisher, Jesse was “subject to what is called impulsive insanity, which rendered him at times wholly irresponsible.” Indeed, Fisher “had not the slightest doubt” that, at the time of the murder, Jesse—in the grip of his mania—did not even know he was committing a crime. As a result, Fisher did “not consider him a case for capital punishment.”

  Judge Dwight Foster, one of several legal experts to appear at the hearing, concurred. Foster made it clear that he was not opposed to the death penalty per se. On the contrary, he thought the law “should be kept on the statute book.” But for that very reason, he felt strongly that it had to be administered with the utmost caution. And to inflict “the extreme penalty of the law” upon Pomeroy was wrong.

  There were several reasons for this belief, beginning with the jury’s written recommendation of mercy. According to Foster, he had “never known a case, either in this country or in Europe, where such a recommendation has been disregarded.” An even more important consideration was Jesse’s innate and incurable “propensity to commit terrible acts.” “The boy came into the world with these propensities, which he could not restrain,” said Foster, “and when God permits such beings to be born, I do not believe the law ought to take their lives, unless the safety of society absolutely requires it—which is not the case in this instance.”

  Following an hour-long recess at noon, a colleague of Foster’s, Judge Edgar Thomas, added his voice to the chorus of speakers who favored commutation. Thomas declared that, after a careful examination of the evidence, he had come to believe, like Judge Foster, that “the jury would never have returned a guilty verdict had not the recommendation for mercy been appended.” In his opinion, “the boy was wholly unaccountable and should be restrained for life, but not hanged.”

  Other jurists who spoke on behalf of clemency included the Honorable John A. Nowell and a young lawyer named H. A. Bowies, who addressed the widespread concern that, should the sentence be commuted to life imprisonment, Pomeroy would one day be set free to terrorize the city again. Consulting a sheet of paper containing the results of his extensive research, Bowies cited statistics showing that, while one hundred percent of imprisoned murderers were ultimately pardoned between 1800 and 1825, only forty-five percent were pardoned in the following twenty-five years. And since 1850, that figure had dropped to less than eighteen percent. Moreover, in none of these cases had a “malicious murderer” ever been pardoned. Indeed, Bowies argued, “the record of the Committee on Pardons conclusively shows that, in every instance, the circumstances of the murder were such that, if they were tried today, not one of the pardoned killers would have been convicted of murder in the first degree.” Bowies concluded by urging that “true justice be meted out” and cautioned against those who would subject Pomeroy to the “extreme penalty of the law” on the basis of sheer emotion “or the logic of the heart.”

  The last—and most eloquent—witness to speak on behalf of commutation was the Reverend William H. H. Murray, who began by deploring the irrational dread—“unusual in the history of Massachusetts”—that had seized the community. “There is a fear in the minds of the mothers, and a cry of ‘hang him,’ lest, peradventure, he shall be pardoned out, and no mother’s child be safe.” After noting this dismaying state of affairs—akin, he suggested, to a mass hysteria—Wilson insisted that “the probability of this boy being again turned loose upon the community was too small to be considered.” Barring the election of a “vicious” Executive—a contingency that seemed “impossible to conceive”—“society would be just as safe with Jesse Pomeroy in prison for life as with Jesse Pomeroy hanged.”

  Wilson took the opportunity to deliver an argument against the death penalty, citing records from other states in America, as well as from Europe, to prove that an “increase in capital punishment did not cause a corresponding decrease in capital crimes.” The law in Masachusetts, he continued, “was not based upon the principle of punishment but of protection—and the principle of the law would be as safe if the sentence were commuted as if it were carried out.”

  Wilson concluded with a heartfelt appeal to the feelings of the councillors; with a harsh rebuke to “the fear and lack of judgment of those women who had been induced, for the first time in the history of the state, to connect the holy name of mother with an appeal for blood”; and finally with a vivid evocation of “the woe of the one mother whose child’s life” was in the governor’s hands.

  * * *

  The opponents of commutation were allowed to speak next. They were represented by an attorney named Paul West, who made a powerful opening argument, urging the enforcement of the death penalty. West began by stressing the “weight that ought to be given to the petitions of the mothers of Boston,” who would live in a continual state of anxiety should Pomeroy be spared from execution. Dismissing the defense psychiatrists as vague and unreliable—particularly in
their claim that Jesse’s crimes had been unmotivated—West declared that there was nothing at all mysterious about what drove the boy. The simple fact—as illustrated by the progressively savage nature of his assaults—was that Pomeroy had a “bloodthirsty disposition” and had deliberately set about “cultivating it.” It was well-known, for example, that he enjoyed reading dime novels about frontier warfare and Indian torture—irrefutable proof of the extreme pleasure he took in indulging his violent propensities.

  West took care to point out that Jesse had already received one commutation, when he was released from Reform School after less than eighteen months. That ill-advised action, West said gravely, “had cost two little children their lives.” He concluded by urging that the death sentence not be commuted for two reasons: first, for the safety of the community, and second, for the sake of deterrence.

  Another lawyer, Mr. Thomas Dudley, then read a petition in favor of the death sentence containing the signatures of over three hundred residents of Cambridge. Dudley was followed by the Reverend Mr. Toles of the Baldwin Place Home, who used the occasion to deliver an impassioned attack on the evils of “trashy” dime novels, whose celebration of frontier violence had ostensibly inspired several lads from his own orphanage to run off to the West and “shoot Indians.”