Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 02.pdf/126

 Kemmlers Case and the Death-Penalty.

KEMMLER'S CASE AND THE DEATH-PENALTY. II. By Jacob Spahn. OURELY a point has now been reached where the fiercest denunciation of our present laws concerning crime and criminal punishments of all sorts, from the death-pen alty downward, will be meet and warranted; where it is entirely just to castigate those laws for being infamously puerile, illogical, insufficient, and inefficacious. Their com pilers had not the first conception of the real evil they were meant to rectify in man, nor the true function they were meant to subserve in society's behalf. These laws, moreover, are boundlessly stupid, hopelessly absurd, and inexpiably unjust. You trace no reason in them, but too readily trace the "eye for an eye," "tooth for a tooth," and "life for a life " principle of revengeful com pensation all through them. They are poor successors of the Roman lex talionis, and too clearly of kin with the Corsican vendetta, be ing just as insensate as both. They make Lynch law and the like arbitrary brute ac tivity on the part of men inevitable. The God — if any God permeate them at all — is not He of Calvary; and Emilio Castelar's burning words rush to the quivering lip, and would thunder out against the whole inhuman scheme and machinery of them. Here might humanity and the humanitarian truly step in, and apply reformatory labors in endless quantity. The mistake throughout is the perpetua tion of laws made when society was stoneblind to much and deliberately ignored more, and when in the course of a system of fuli ginous and nubiferous ratiocination, it had succeeded in obfuscating itself into a convic tion that it had the right, duly derived from a competent source, always to take the life and the liberty of a person under certain specified circumstances. Does not a plain-

featured, dowdy, ill-read old woman, simplehearted enough in some things, yet of un bending pride and conceit, still subscribe herself in royally rampant, fulminating style, "Victoria, Queen by the grace of God," etc., though she never met the Deity of her "Dei Gratia" in her life, and cannot show any due rescript authorizing her to subscribe herself anywhere as anything more than any other human biped "by the grace of God"? Yet behind her in this shallow folly, and continuing the sanction accorded in ages of superstition, oppression, and ignorance, stand serried millions of liege subjects with submis sive purses. This curious phenomenon is the modern illustration of the ancient doctrine that the person of the king is sacred, how ever commonplace and inferior that person may be. And the bequest of the modern citizen's ancestors' mental confusion of regal and legal majesty and inviolability may ex plain why this citizen is kept well disciplined under so much bad law. Little, indeed, has the law as a science (such it ambitiously claims to be) ever essen tially understood or indubitably established about man with reference to crime. The harelip is understood; so is spinal curvature; so are six-fingered and six-toed, as well as web-fingered and web-toed persons. So are born cripples, albinos, red hair, color blind ness, rudimentary and functionless organs, with much else entirely out of the usual and supposed normal in the structural for mation of the human body and its outward appearance. The physical monstrosity among men has even ceased to be the accursed of God. Heredity in all these multifarious abnormalities has come to be understood. So has the ability to raise varying species of the same genus artificially by selection