“My little girl Virginia, only four years old, has been praying to Santa
Claus every night for the past week, instead of to God. She has asked
Santa every night to give her her papa for Christmas.”
“It seems all a dream, and I am afraid that I will awake to find it isn’t
true. But I felt all day that the pardon would come. I don’t know why it
was, but I caught myself singing this morning as I went about the house.
It is the happiest day of my life. It will be the happiest Christmas that
my family has ever spent.”
“Fred doesn’t know that the pardon board meets today. He expects that it
will meet Thursday. I am going to take the pardon with me to the prison,
present it to Warden Wolfer and take my husband home with me.”
It is a young woman, the wife of a chief of police convicted of grafting,
pleading before the pardon board for his release. She has worked a year
securing evidence. It is just two days before Christmas and the board is
called for a special session. The governor, the chief justice of the
supreme court and the attorney general, who constitute the pardon board,
hear her case with tears in their eyes. Attorneys and others plead for him
also. Then the board goes into session. They decide that seventeen months
in prison has served the ends of justice. They summon the young wife.
“Your husband has been granted a full pardon,” announces one of the
members.
“May he come home with me now?” she asks, faltering, then she swoons. Soon
she recovers. The pardon is signed. She takes it with her to Stillwater,
presents it to the warden and a moment later husband and wife are in each
other’s arms. Merry Christmas it was for them.
“He’s all I’ve got, judge. I’ll take him anywhere, or I’ll keep him right
at home in Minneapolis, if you will only let him out. I want to take care
of him, for he’ll die if he stays there.” Tears drop from the mother of a
youth of twenty‐two who has been sent to prison for twelve years for
larceny. “I’ve saved $250 in the last five years, and me doing day work,”
she says proudly. Her son is suffering from tuberculosis. The board
believes that it is better for him to be under such a mother’s care than
die in the prison and he is released.
Nowhere else, unless it be at a hospital, must one gaze at such a
seemingly unending sad procession of pain‐torn hearts, the anguished souls
of mothers, fathers, sisters, sweethearts and wives, than at the meeting
of the pardon board every three months. Nowhere else are the grinding
knives of the law more apparent. Few are as fortunate as the two cited
above. Of the two or three dozen cases at each meeting, seldom are more
than two or three persons shown any mercy.
Here is the case of a murderer sentenced to hang. An attorney pleads for
him; points out that the evidence was doubtful, says that the spirit of
vengeance guided the jury. But the board has the evidence before it. “It
clearly shows that the crime was premeditated,” remarks one member. There
is no hope.
A sweet faced girl who has journeyed all the way from Seattle to take her
brother back with her, finds that the law could not pardon an offender
because his sister believes in him and loves him. The board must be shown
that the punishment was too severe for the crime or that life at home will
serve better to make the offender a useful citizen than doing penance at
the prison.
To an aged father and mother of a boy serving a thirty‐month sentence for
stealing $56 worth of grain, the sad news is meted out that their son must
serve out his sentence. They had trusted with the blind faith that the
board would release him because they needed him. “The farm is running down
and Charlie ought to be home to help care for things. He had always been a
good boy,” they said.
Scathing lectures are often given those asking pardon for the undeserving,
by the members of the board. “Do you think fifteen months is too much for
a man who shot his wife? It was not his fault she did not die,” the chief
justice recently told some friends of a man who had hunted up and shot a
wife who had left him. “If my sister were outraged by a man, shooting
would be none too good for him,” the governor recently told a smooth‐
tongued attorney who was making a plea for a man serving a long sentence
for a heinous crime.
So it goes. There is mercy for a few; there is the stern and unrelenting
law tor the many.
[decoration, smoking gun]