Page:Household Words - Volume 12.djvu/34

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HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

[Aug. -1, 1B55.] environs, an interest which will be easily understood, and which tilled the hall with an anxious and overflowing throng. The bitter reproaches which Lesnier's advocate directly addressed against the three accused were richly deserved, although they do not accord with our forms of criminal justice. Monsieur the President Delange summed up. The jury, after an hour and half's consideration, replied negatively to the questions of homicide and incendiarism relative to Lespagne, and affirmatively to those of blows resulting ill death, without the intention of causing it, and of subornation of false witnesses. The woman Lespagne and Daignaud were declared guilty of false witness. Attenuating circumstances were admitted in favour of the three accused. In consequence of this verdict, the three accused were each condemned to twenty years of hard labour.

What the "attenuating circumstances" were, Heaven may know, but no mortal can guess, unless M. Lesnier will have the magnanimity to suggest any in his forthcoming autobiography. All that one is able to make out of the meaning of "attenuating circumstances" in France is, that they are the representatives, in so many letters and syllables, of an unwillingness to strike the last irrevocable blow; they are the sobering influence which time interposes between the commission of a crime and its punishment; they are the angels of mercy who shout to justice, "Beware lest preventive punishment become revenge and retaliation!" they are benevolent fictions raised to temper the severity of deserved retribution; they are the John Does and the Richard Roes of judicial forbearance.

M. Gergerès instituted proceedings at civil law demanding the sum of fifty thousand francs damages. The court, in a subsequent audience devoted to this decision, allowed ten thousand francs damages to Lesnier. It now rests with the supreme court (perhaps it may be done already) to cancel the sentence of July eighteen hundred and forty-eight, as irreconcilable with that of March, eighteen hundred and fifty-five, and to remand the accused before a new court, to pronounce a final and definitive judgment on their fate. The man Lespague will probably get hard labour for life.

The immense revulsion in the tide of Lesnier's existence can be appreciated only by himself; and scarcely by himself, yet. It takes time for such a series of events to ferment, and work themselves clear, in a man's thoughts and feelings. Lookers on can only say, that if similar judicial errors are happily becoming rarer from year to year, the real point to be arrived at is, to make their commision impossible. Again, too, that if committed, they should not be irretrievable. No man living can be secure that he shall never be the object of unfounded accusations; no man can be sure of not being surprised, unconsciously mixed up with doubtful and even suspicious circumstances. And if things go wrong; if a sentence past recal is pronounced—without entertaining the entire abolition of the punishment of death in certain cases—the facts thus briefly related are sufficient to make us ponder seriously the question, whether we have a right to hang, or not, criminals who have been found guilty of murder, by twelve men of fallible judgment, except upon evidence that amounts to demonstration of guilt.

The newspapers report that one of the jury, who condemned Lesnier, went and shook hands with him, expressing at the same time his regrets and his felicitations. We can sympathise with the tempest and struggle in that juror's mind, and congratulate him on the happiness he must feel now, on remembering that Lesnier was only sentenced to hard labour for life. But the judge who has ever hung an innocent man—can he banish from his presence, by night or by day, the earnest, tearful, pale, protesting phantom, to whom the last words he deigned to address were, "the Lord have mercy on !"

In a French newspaper, bearing the date of July the eleventh, eighteen hundred and fifty-five, appears the following : "By order of the Emperor, his Excellency the Minister of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, has just named Monsieur Lesnier, Son, government commissary to the coal-mine company of La Mayenne and La Sarthe. Monsieur Lesnier, late schoolmaster, condemned in eighteen hundred and forty-seven, to hard labour for life for murder and arson, had, by his exemplary conduct, merited the confidence of the commissaire of the Bagne, who employed him in his office when, seven years after his condemnation, his innocence was completely demonstrated, thanks to the pious and active devotion of his father. In consequence of a judgment pronounced against the real perpetrators of the double crime, whose manœuvres had misled the authorities, he has been discharged, by a decree of the Court of Assizes of the Haute Garonne of the twenty-seventh of June, from the accusation brought against him. This formal reparation did not completely pay the debt owed by society; and it has been the wish of his majesty, in giving M. Lesnier an honourable employment, to repair the ruin brought upon him by a fatal judicial error."

This is satisfactory, and as it should be. But if M. Lesnier, instead of being condemned to forced work for life, had been buried in quicklime within the precincts of a jail, all the reparation that society and the Secretary of State could have made would be the restoration of what remained of his remains to his friends, to receive the posthumous compliment of decent burial.