Fiend (30 page)

The interest in the trial of Jesse H. Pomeroy has not ceased with his conviction of murder in the first degree, and now continues in the speculation as to his sentence and as to whether the recommendation to mercy on the part of the jury will be considered.

—
The Boston Globe,
December 14, 1874

L
ike the teenage atrocities that have stunned our nation in recent years, the Pomeroy case struck many observers as a terrifying symptom of societal decay—of the evil that results from what we now call the breakdown of “family values.” On December 12, 1874, for example—one day after Jesse’s trial ended—the
Boston Globe
published an editorial that (allowing for its old-fashioned diction and dated details) could have been published in the wake of the so-called Jonesboro, Arkansas, massacre of 1998, or the 1997 slayings at West Paducah, Kentucky, where a fourteen-year-old high school student opened fire on eight of his classmates as they stood in a prayer circle.

Headlined “Keep Children from Crime,” the editorial began by criticizing Jesse’s parents for failing to provide those “restraining influences” that would have “counteracted the natural weaknesses of their son’s moral character.” “There can be little doubt,” declared the writer, “that if there had been proper discipline exercised in his case, society would have been spared the horror of his crimes. . . . Jesse Pomeroy would probably have never developed a high moral character, but had he passed the period of youth under suitable discipline, his sense of the danger of indulging his cruel propensities would have saved his victims and society from atrocity.”

Because his parents were separated, and his overworked mother was rarely at home, Jesse had been left to his own devices—free
to indulge his taste for violent entertainment. Surely, the writer suggested, had Jesse been raised in a more settled household, his parents would never have permitted him to revel in the lurid thrills of dime novels. “Can there be a question,” the editorialist wrote, “that instead of allowing him to gloat over the recital of Indian atrocities, which stimulated the worst tendencies of his nature, the best parental care would have ascertained and corrected these bloodthirsty characteristics?”

To be sure, the writer was sympathetic to Mrs. Pomeroy’s situation. She was, after all, a hardworking, husbandless woman, struggling to make ends meet. But her son’s case only highlighted the “danger to society” represented by “those who have no adequate care taken of them at home.” In short, as portayed in this editorial, Jesse Pomeroy was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a type painfully familiar to our own day: the juvenile felon whose crimes are ascribed to his broken home, lack of parental supervision, and overexposure to violent entertainment.

According to the editorialist, moreover, Pomeroy’s case—though clearly extreme—was by no means unique. On the contrary, it was evidence of a frightening social trend. Citing a recently published volume “by the National Prison Association of the United States upon the extent and causes of crime in this country,” the writer was alarmed to note that “one-fifth of all our prisoners are mere boys, ranging from childhood to twenty years. Nearly half the convicts in one prison are young lads, another has nearly a third, and in another two-thirds of all the inmates are under thirty years of age.” Though convicts in their early to late twenties hardly seem to qualify as “mere boys,” the writer nevertheless concluded that this ostensible epidemic of juvenile criminality resulted directly from the absence of proper parental supervision (particularly among the poor) and urged that greater attention be paid to the care and education of neglected young children. By this means, he concluded, “the causes of crime may be largely removed, and the boys and girls who are growing up in ignorance and vice be made useful and happy citizens.”

*  *  *

Other papers, too, weighed in with their opinions on the day after the verdict. Editorials in the
Boston Herald,
the
Boston Post,
the
Boston Daily Advertiser,
even the
New York Times,
all praised the Pomeroy jurors for their “discernment and courage” in “disregarding
the defense of insanity so earnestly urged by the prisoner’s counsel.” The jury’s task had been made especially hard by the extreme atrocity of Jesse’s acts, which (as the
Post
’s writer put it) “came nearer the borderland of insanity than most crimes.” But by exercising their common sense, the jurors had arrived at the proper decision, perceiving that—for all the “diabolical cruelty of his deeds”—Jesse had gone about them “with deliberation, coolness, and method quite too remarkable to be accounted for by any theory of mental derangement.”

The papers were also in agreement that the jury’s mixed verdict—guilty of murder in the first degree, with a recommendation that the punishment be imprisonment for life—was a reasonable decision, given the natural reluctance of any civilized man to condemn a fourteen-year-old child to the gallows. Indeed, the editorial writers unanimously agreed that “the jury’s recommendation will most probably remit the death penalty.”

Whatever the final outcome, however, the crucial point was that “under no circumstances, now or hereafter, must the Pomeroy boy go free, for there is no security against his repeating his horrible crimes.” Ultimately, it would be for the governor and the council to determine his fate. But as the
Herald
insisted, “whether living or dying, society must be rid of the presence of this strange being, whose career is one of the most remarkable in the annals of crime.”

34

I must save the life of that boy.

—Charles Robinson, Jr.

A
t first, it seemed as though, in predicting that Jesse would be spared from the gallows, the newspaper pundits had guessed wrong.

Firmly convinced that his client should have been acquitted, Jesse’s attorney, Charles Robinson, Jr., filed exceptions that were argued before the Supreme Judicial Court on Monday, February 1, 1875. Robinson insisted that the boy was insane, as demonstrated by his “acts and declarations” not only
during
the commission of the crime but
after
it as well. The defense therefore had the right, within reasonable limits, to introduce evidence of his client’s subsequent behavior. In the present case, however, the admission of such evidence had been treated not as “a matter of right,” but as “a matter within the absolute discretion of the court.” And the court, Robinson argued, had adopted limitations that were “too restrictive.”

Robinson, for example, had wanted to call George B. Munroe, an officer of the county jail, to testify to Pomeroy’s conduct while awaiting the start of the trial. The court, however, had “excluded this testimony, as relating to a time too long after the homicide to be material.” Moreover, Robinson claimed that certain medical witnesses had not been allowed to be fully heard.

Attorney General Train’s answer was, in substance, that no presumption of insanity could arise by proving
subsequent
insanity; that the defense alienists had arrived at their conclusions by examining the defendant more than three months
after
the crime, whereas the question submitted to the jury was whether the defendant was of sound mind
at the time
of the homicide; that the
“limitation of time within which the testimony was to be confined” was, in fact, “purely within the discretion of the court”; and that the defendant’s counsel had acquiesced in the ruling of the court.

In the end, the court sided with the prosecution. Three weeks after Robinson argued his exceptions—on Saturday, February 20, 1875—Jesse Harding Pomeroy was sentenced to death.

Early that morning, Jesse was brought from the county jail to the Supreme Judicial Courthouse. At precisely 9:00
A.M.
, Chief Justice Horace Gray entered and took his seat upon the bench. Moments later, Attorney Train rose from his place and addressed the judge. After reviewing the salient facts—the grand jury’s indictment, the prisoner’s arraignment and plea, the “thorough and impartial” trial, the finding of the verdict and the overruling of the exceptions, Train moved that “the sentence of the law be imposed upon” the prisoner.

At Judge Gray’s direction, the clerk then turned to Pomeroy and asked if he had anything to say before sentence was pronounced.

“No, sir,” Jesse answered calmly.

Fixing Jesse with a somber look, Judge Gray then addressed the young prisoner directly. The verdict had been based, he declared, “upon the idea that the murder was committed, not with premeditated malice but under circumstances of extreme atrocity and cruelty.” It was the jury’s intention—and the judge’s hope—that the punishment meted out to the prisoner “would serve as an example to all others who might thereafter be disposed to gratify a morbid love of cruelty.”

Once the jury had rendered its verdict of murder in the first degree, Judge Gray explained, “the court had no discretion in imposing the sentence, which is fixed by statute.” It was true that the jury had accompanied its verdict with a recommendation of mercy; but that recommendation, said the judge, “could have no effect upon the court.” It would be forwarded to the governor, but “whether he would yield to its prayer was impossible to determine.”

Folding his hands tightly before him, Chief Justice Gray declared that it was his duty to remind the prisoner “of the importance of turning your thoughts to an appeal to the Eternal Judge of all hearts, and a preparation for the doom which awaits you.” Then, in the highly charged stillness of the courtroom, he cleared his throat and pronounced the grim sentence: that Jesse Harding
Pomeroy “be taken from this place and kept in close confinement in the County Prison until such day as the Excecutive Government shall by warrant appoint, thence to be taken to the place of execution and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God, of His infinite wisdom, have mercy on your soul.”

Though the judge’s voice did not falter as he spoke these words, he wore a look that struck several observers as deeply dismayed. Indeed, virtually everyone present—with the predictable exception of Jesse himself, who looked as unconcerned as always—seemed powerfully affected by the awful gravity of the occasion. The great and enlightened State of Massachusetts had just condemned a fourteen-year-old boy to the gallows.

35

Having read, with feelings of pain, of the visit of a number of persons, clad in the garments of womanhood, who waited upon you, praying that Your Excellency would
not
commute the sentence of the unfortunate being who bears the name of Jesse Pomeroy, I feel called upon, in the name of humanity, to make an effort in his behalf, scarcely daring to hope that my plea will be of avail; yet . . . I cannot remain silent and feel that my hands are free from the stain of bloodguiltiness.

—E. A. Robinson, Letter to Governor William Gaston, March 22, 1875

O
n the following Monday—February 22, 1875—the
Boston Globe
ran an editorial that conveyed the intense qualms many people felt about the sentence. Few would question that the “boy fiend” was “a most dangerous creature,” said the paper, and that his sentence was “legally just.” But “still fewer will applaud his execution,” for “there is something revolting in the thought of the hanging of a mere boy, no matter what his crimes may have been.” Perhaps the best solution would be to keep the boy “caged for life” with “some guaranty . . . that he would never be pardoned or released until death should release him.” In the opinion of the paper, most Bostonians “would rejoice to see this disposition made of him.”

Pomeroy’s case, in short, presented a profound dilemma to the average citizen—a conflict between the dictates of the law and the promptings of Christian conscience. “Thoroughly bad, sane beyond a doubt, a cold, calculating, fiendish murderer of little boys and girls,” the editorial concluded, “the law says hang him as a punishment for his crime and for the safety of the community. Humanity says anything save that.”