I WILL take for the subject of this letter, the effect of Capital
Punishment on the commission of crime, or rather of murder; the only
crime with one exception (and that a rare one) to which it is now
applied. Its effect in preventing crime, I will reserve for another
letter: and a few of the more striking illustrations of each aspect of
the subject, for a concluding one.
The effect of Capital Punishment on the commission of Murder.
Some murders are committed in hot blood and furious rage; some, in
deliberate revenge; some, in terrible despair; some (but not many) for
mere gain; some, for the removal of an object dangerous to the murderer’s
peace or good name; some, to win a monstrous notoriety.
On murders committed in rage, in the despair of strong affection (as when
a starving child is murdered by its parent) or for gain, I believe the
punishment of death to have no effect in the least. In the two first
cases, the impulse is a blind and wild one, infinitely beyond the reach
of any reference to the punishment. In the last, there is little
calculation beyond the absorbing greed of the money to be got.
Courvoisier, for example, might have robbed his master with greater
safety, and with fewer chances of detection, if he had not murdered him.
But, his calculations going to the gain and not to the loss, he had no
balance for the consequences of what he did. So, it would have been more
safe and prudent in the woman who was hanged a few weeks since, for the
murder in Westminster, to have simply robbed her old companion in an
unguarded moment, as in her sleep. But, her calculation going to the
gain of what she took to be a Bank note; and the poor old woman living
between her and the gain; she murdered her.
On murders committed in deliberate revenge, or to remove a stumbling
block in the murderer’s path, or in an insatiate craving for notoriety,
is there reason to suppose that the punishment of death has the direct
effect of an incentive and an impulse?
A murder is committed in deliberate revenge. The murderer is at no
trouble to prepare his train of circumstances, takes little or no pains
to escape, is quite cool and collected, perfectly content to deliver
himself up to the Police, makes no secret of his guilt, but boldly says,
“I killed him. I’m glad of it. I meant to do it. I am ready to die.”
There was such a case the other day. There was such another case not
long ago. There are such cases frequently. It is the commonest first
exclamation on being seized. Now, what is this but a false arguing of
the question, announcing a foregone conclusion, expressly leading to the
crime, and inseparably arising out of the Punishment of Death? “I took
his life. I give up mine to pay for it. Life for life; blood for blood.
I have done the crime. I am ready with the atonement. I know all about
it; it’s a fair bargain between me and the law. Here am I to execute my
part of it; and what more is to be said or done?” It is the very essence
of the maintenance of this punishment for murder, that it _does_ set life
against life. It is in the essence of a stupid, weak, or otherwise
ill-regulated mind (of such a murderer’s mind, in short), to recognise in
this set off, a something that diminishes the base and coward character
of murder. “In a pitched battle, I, a common man, may kill my adversary,
but he may kill me. In a duel, a gentleman may shoot his opponent
through the head, but the opponent may shoot him too, and this makes it
fair. Very well. I take this man’s life for a reason I have, or choose
to think I have, and the law takes mine. The law says, and the clergyman
says, there must be blood for blood and life for life. Here it is. I
pay the penalty.”
A mind incapable, or confounded in its perceptions—and you must argue
with reference to such a mind, or you could not have such a murder—may
not only establish on these grounds an idea of strict justice and fair
reparation, but a stubborn and dogged fortitude and foresight that
satisfy it hugely. Whether the fact be really so, or not, is a question
I would be content to rest, alone, on the number of cases of revengeful
murder in which this is well known, without dispute, to have been the
prevailing demeanour of the criminal: and in which such speeches and such
absurd reasoning have been constantly uppermost with him. “Blood for
blood”, and “life for life”, and such like balanced jingles, have passed
current in people’s mouths, from legislators downwards, until they have
been corrupted into “tit for tat”, and acted on.
Next, come the murders done, to sweep out of the way a dreaded or
detested object. At the bottom of this class of crimes, there is a slow,
corroding, growing hate. Violent quarrels are commonly found to have
taken place between the murdered person and the murderer: usually of
opposite sexes. There are witnesses to old scenes of reproach and
recrimination, in which they were the actors; and the murderer has been
heard to say, in this or that coarse phrase, “that he wouldn’t mind
killing her, though he should be hanged for it”—in these cases, the
commonest avowal.
It seems to me, that in this well-known scrap of evidence, there is a
deeper meaning than is usually attached to it. I do not know, but it may
be—I have a strong suspicion that it is—a clue to the slow growth of the
crime, and its gradual development in the mind. More than this; a clue
to the mental connection of the deed, with the punishment to which the
doer of that deed is liable, until the two, conjoined, give birth to
monstrous and misshapen Murder.
The idea of murder, in such a case, like that of self-destruction in the
great majority of instances, is not a new one. It may have presented
itself to the disturbed mind in a dim shape and afar off; but it has been
there. After a quarrel, or with some strong sense upon him of irritation
or discomfort arising out of the continuance of this life in his path,
the man has brooded over the unformed desire to take it. “Though he
should be hanged for it.” With the entrance of the Punishment into his
thoughts, the shadow of the fatal beam begins to attend—not on himself,
but on the object of his hate. At every new temptation, it is there,
stronger and blacker yet, trying to terrify him. When she defies or
threatens him, the scaffold seems to be her strength and “vantage
ground”. Let her not be too sure of that; “though he should be hanged
for it”.
Thus, he begins to raise up, in the contemplation of this death by
hanging, a new and violent enemy to brave. The prospect of a slow and
solitary expiation would have no congeniality with his wicked thoughts,
but this throttling and strangling has. There is always before him, an
ugly, bloody, scarecrow phantom, that champions her, as it were, and yet
shows him, in a ghastly way, the example of murder. Is she very weak, or
very trustful in him, or infirm, or old? It gives a hideous courage to
what would be mere slaughter otherwise; for there it is, a presence
always about her, darkly menacing him with that penalty whose murky
secret has a fascination for all secret and unwholesome thoughts. And
when he struggles with his victim at the last, “though he should be
hanged for it”, it is a merciless wrestle, not with one weak life only,
but with that ever-haunting, ever-beckoning shadow of the gallows, too;
and with a fierce defiance to it, after their long survey of each other,
to come on and do its worst.
Present this black idea of violence to a bad mind contemplating violence;
hold up before a man remotely compassing the death of another person, the
spectacle of his own ghastly and untimely death by man’s hands; and out
of the depths of his own nature you shall assuredly raise up that which
lures and tempts him on. The laws which regulate those mysteries have
not been studied or cared for, by the maintainers of this law; but they
are paramount and will always assert their power.
Out of one hundred and sixty-seven persons under sentence of Death in
England, questioned at different times, in the course of years, by an
English clergyman in the performance of his duty, there were only three
who had not been spectators of executions.
We come, now, to the consideration of those murders which are committed,
or attempted, with no other object than the attainment of an infamous
notoriety. That this class of crimes has its origin in the Punishment of
Death, we cannot question; because (as we have already seen, and shall
presently establish by another proof) great notoriety and interest
attach, and are generally understood to attach, only to those criminals
who are in danger of being executed.
One of the most remarkable instances of murder originating in mad
self-conceit; and of the murderer’s part in the repulsive drama, in which
the law appears at such great disadvantage to itself and to society,
being acted almost to the last with a self-complacency that would be
horribly ludicrous if it were not utterly revolting; is presented in the
case of Hocker.
Here is an insolent, flippant, dissolute youth: aping the man of intrigue
and levity: over-dressed, over-confident, inordinately vain of his
personal appearance: distinguished as to his hair, cane, snuff-box, and
singing-voice: and unhappily the son of a working shoemaker. Bent on
loftier flights than such a poor house-swallow as a teacher in a
Sunday-school can take; and having no truth, industry, perseverance, or
other dull work-a-day quality, to plume his wings withal; he casts about
him, in his jaunty way, for some mode of distinguishing himself—some
means of getting that head of hair into the print-shops; of having
something like justice done to his singing-voice and fine intellect; of
making the life and adventures of Thomas Hocker remarkable; and of
getting up some excitement in connection with that slighted piece of
biography. The Stage? No. Not feasible. There has always been a
conspiracy against the Thomas Hockers, in that kind of effort. It has
been the same with Authorship in prose and poetry. Is there nothing
else? A Murder, now, would make a noise in the papers! There is the
gallows to be sure; but without that, it would be nothing. Short of
that, it wouldn’t be fame. Well! We must all die at one time or other;
and to die game, and have it in print, is just the thing for a man of
spirit. They always die game at the Minor Theatres and the Saloons, and
the people like it very much. Thurtell, too, died very game, and made a
capital speech when he was tried. There’s all about it in a book at the
cigar-shop now. Come, Tom, get your name up! Let it be a dashing murder
that shall keep the wood-engravers at it for the next two months. You
are the boy to go through with it, and interest the town!
The miserable wretch, inflated by this lunatic conceit, arranges his
whole plan for publication and effect. It is quite an epitome of his
experience of the domestic melodrama or penny novel. There is the Victim
Friend; the mysterious letter of the injured Female to the Victim Friend;
the romantic spot for the Death-Struggle by night; the unexpected
appearance of Thomas Hocker to the Policeman; the parlour of the Public
House, with Thomas Hocker reading the paper to a strange gentleman; the
Family Apartment, with a song by Thomas Hocker; the Inquest Room, with
Thomas Hocker boldly looking on; the interior of the Marylebone Theatre,
with Thomas Hocker taken into custody; the Police Office with Thomas
Hocker “affable” to the spectators; the interior of Newgate, with Thomas
Hocker preparing his defence; the Court, where Thomas Hocker, with his
dancing-master airs, is put upon his trial, and complimented by the
Judge; the Prosecution, the Defence, the Verdict, the Black Cap, the
Sentence—each of them a line in any Playbill, and how bold a line in
Thomas Hocker’s life!
It is worthy of remark, that the nearer he approaches to the gallows—the
great last scene to which the whole of these effects have been working
up—the more the overweening conceit of the poor wretch shows itself; the
more he feels that he is the hero of the hour; the more audaciously and
recklessly he lies, in supporting the character. In public—at the
condemned sermon—he deports himself as becomes the man whose autographs
are precious, whose portraits are innumerable; in memory of whom, whole
fences and gates have been borne away, in splinters, from the scene of
murder. He knows that the eyes of Europe are upon him; but he is not
proud—only graceful. He bows, like the first gentleman in Europe, to the
turnkey who brings him a glass of water; and composes his clothes and
hassock as carefully, as good Madame Blaize could do. In private—within
the walls of the condemned cell—every word and action of his waning life,
is a lie. His whole time is divided between telling lies and writing
them. If he ever have another thought, it is for his genteel appearance
on the scaffold; as when he begs the barber “not to cut his hair too
short, or they won’t know him when he comes out”. His last proceeding
but one is to write two romantic love letters to women who have no
existence. His last proceeding of all (but less characteristic, though
the only true one) is to swoon away, miserably, in the arms of the
attendants, and be hanged up like a craven dog.
Is not such a history, from first to last, a most revolting and
disgraceful one; and can the student of it bring himself to believe that
it ever could have place in any record of facts, or that the miserable
chief-actor in it could have ever had a motive for his arrogant
wickedness, but for the comment and the explanation which the Punishment
of Death supplies!
It is not a solitary case, nor is it a prodigy, but a mere specimen of a
class. The case of Oxford, who fired at Her Majesty in the Park, will be
found, on examination, to resemble it very nearly, in the essential
feature. There is no proved pretence whatever for regarding him as mad;
other than that he was like this malefactor, brimful of conceit, and a
desire to become, even at the cost of the gallows (the only cost within
his reach) the talk of the town. He had less invention than Hocker, and
perhaps was not so deliberately bad; but his attempt was a branch of the
same tree, and it has its root in the ground where the scaffold is
erected.
Oxford had his imitators. Let it never be forgotten in the consideration
of this part of the subject, how they were stopped. So long as attempts
invested them with the distinction of being in danger of death at the
hangman’s hands, so long did they spring up. When the penalty of death
was removed, and a mean and humiliating punishment substituted in its
place, the race was at an end, and ceased to be.