Fiend (32 page)

The petitioners for commutation testified first, with Charles Robinson, Jr., making the opening address. Though he was there, he insisted, “not as a lawyer so much as a private citizen who knows more about young Pomeroy than anyone else,” Robinson’s hour-long speech was essentially a summary of the arguments he had set forth at the trial. He spoke of the “childhood disorders” that “had seriously affected Jesse’s temperament.” He described the “mania for cruelty” that had manifested itself by the time Jesse was four or five years old—the unnatural pleasure the little boy derived from “torturing small animals.”

“In school,” Robinson continued, Jesse had “shown a total lack of feeling, caring nothing about punishment and being not at all improved in any way thereby.” Nor had he ever “displayed
the least remorse” for the killings of Horace Millen and Katie Curran. All these facts—along with the sheer senselessness and atrocity of the murders (which Robinson reviewed in graphic detail)—proved beyond dispute that young Pomeroy was insane.

The two expert witnesses who had testified for the defense—Drs. John Tyler and Clement Walker—spoke next. They, too, gave an abridged version of the points they had made at the trial. Jesse, they agreed, was of “good mental ability” but “morally insane.” This combination of sound intelligence and diseased morality made him a “very dangerous person to the community,” which needed to protect itself from “any further acts of violence.” Since young Pomeroy was not responsible for his acts, however, he should not be subjected to the death penalty. Rather, he ought to be imprisoned for life—“shut away forever,” as Walker put it.

This view was supported by several other psychiatrists, including Dr. Theodore W. Fisher, the examining physician at the Boston Lunatic Asylum. According to Fisher, Jesse was “subject to what is called
impulsive insanity,
which rendered him at times wholly irresponsible.” Indeed, Fisher “had not the slightest doubt” that, at the time of the murder, Jesse—in the grip of his mania—did not even know he was committing a crime. As a result, Fisher did “not consider him a case for capital punishment.”

Judge Dwight Foster, one of several legal experts to appear at the hearing, concurred. Foster made it clear that he was not opposed to the death penalty
per se.
On the contrary, he thought the law “should be kept on the statute book.” But for that very reason, he felt strongly that it had to be administered with the utmost caution. And to inflict “the extreme penalty of the law” upon Pomeroy was wrong.

There were several reasons for this belief, beginning with the jury’s written recommendation of mercy. According to Foster, he had “never known a case, either in this country or in Europe, where such a recommendation has been disregarded.” An even more important consideration was Jesse’s innate and incurable “propensity to commit terrible acts.” “The boy came into the world with these propensities, which he could not restrain,” said Foster, “and when God permits such beings to be born, I do not believe the law ought to take their lives, unless the safety of society absolutely requires it—which is not the case in this instance.”

Following an hour-long recess at noon, a colleague of
Foster’s, Judge Edgar Thomas, added his voice to the chorus of speakers who favored commutation. Thomas declared that, after a careful examination of the evidence, he had come to believe, like Judge Foster, that “the jury would never have returned a guilty verdict had not the recommendation for mercy been appended.” In his opinion, “the boy was wholly unaccountable and should be restrained for life, but not hanged.”

Other jurists who spoke on behalf of clemency included the Honorable John A. Nowell and a young lawyer named H. A. Bowies, who addressed the widespread concern that, should the sentence be commuted to life imprisonment, Pomeroy would one day be set free to terrorize the city again. Consulting a sheet of paper containing the results of his extensive research, Bowies cited statistics showing that, while one hundred percent of imprisoned murderers were ultimately pardoned between 1800 and 1825, only forty-five percent were pardoned in the following twenty-five years. And since 1850, that figure had dropped to less than eighteen percent. Moreover, in
none
of these cases had a
“malicious
murderer” ever been pardoned. Indeed, Bowies argued, “the record of the Committee on Pardons conclusively shows that, in every instance, the circumstances of the murder were such that, if they were tried today, not one of the pardoned killers would have been convicted of murder in the first degree.” Bowies concluded by urging that “true justice be meted out” and cautioned against those who would subject Pomeroy to the “extreme penalty of the law” on the basis of sheer emotion “or the logic of the heart.”

The last—and most eloquent—witness to speak on behalf of commutation was the Reverend William H. H. Murray, who began by deploring the irrational dread—“unusual in the history of Massachusetts”—that had seized the community. “There is a fear in the minds of the mothers, and a cry of ‘hang him,’ lest, peradventure, he shall be pardoned out, and no mother’s child be safe.” After noting this dismaying state of affairs—akin, he suggested, to a mass hysteria—Wilson insisted that “the probability of this boy being again turned loose upon the community was too small to be considered.” Barring the election of a “vicious” Executive—a contingency that seemed “impossible to conceive”—“society would be just as safe with Jesse Pomeroy in prison for life as with Jesse Pomeroy hanged.”

Wilson took the opportunity to deliver an argument against
the death penalty, citing records from other states in America, as well as from Europe, to prove that an “increase in capital punishment did not cause a corresponding decrease in capital crimes.” The law in Masachusetts, he continued, “was not based upon the principle of punishment but of
protection
—and the principle of the law would be as safe if the sentence were commuted as if it were carried out.”

Wilson concluded with a heartfelt appeal to the feelings of the councillors; with a harsh rebuke to “the fear and lack of judgment of those women who had been induced, for the first time in the history of the state, to connect the holy name of
mother
with an appeal for blood”; and finally with a vivid evocation of “the woe of the one mother whose child’s life” was in the governor’s hands.

*  *  *

The opponents of commutation were allowed to speak next. They were represented by an attorney named Paul West, who made a powerful opening argument, urging the enforcement of the death penalty. West began by stressing the “weight that ought to be given to the petitions of the mothers of Boston,” who would live in a continual state of anxiety should Pomeroy be spared from execution. Dismissing the defense psychiatrists as vague and unreliable—particularly in their claim that Jesse’s crimes had been unmotivated—West declared that there was nothing at all mysterious about what drove the boy. The simple fact—as illustrated by the progressively savage nature of his assaults—was that Pomeroy had a “bloodthirsty disposition” and had deliberately set about “cultivating it.” It was well-known, for example, that he enjoyed reading dime novels about frontier warfare and Indian torture—irrefutable proof of the extreme pleasure he took in indulging his violent propensities.

West took care to point out that Jesse had already received one commutation, when he was released from Reform School after less than eighteen months. That ill-advised action, West said gravely, “had cost two little children their lives.” He concluded by urging that the death sentence not be commuted for two reasons: first, for the safety of the community, and second, for the sake of deterrence.

Another lawyer, Mr. Thomas Dudley, then read a petition in favor of the death sentence containing the signatures of over three hundred residents of Cambridge. Dudley was followed by
the Reverend Mr. Toles of the Baldwin Place Home, who used the occasion to deliver an impassioned attack on the evils of “trashy” dime novels, whose celebration of frontier violence had ostensibly inspired several lads from his own orphanage to run off to the West and “shoot Indians.”

The lengthiest—and in many ways most cogent—argument in favor of the death sentence came from ex-Representative H. W. Wilson of South Boston. In terms of
justice,
he declared, the “only question about the boy was the degree of murder of which he was guilty”—and that question had “been settled once and for all” by the jurors. Although they “had the alternative of bringing in a verdict of murder in the second degree—for which the punishment is imprisonment for life—they did not do this.”

The present issue, therefore, had to do, not with justice, but with
mercy.
And on what possible basis, asked Wilson, should mercy be extended to Jesse Pomeroy, “the most atrocious criminal which the State has ever produced”? Was it his age? But the legal age of accountability in Massachusetts was fourteen. If Jesse’s sentence were commuted because of his youth, Wilson argued, then the governor would be “undertaking to roll back the system of government and assume the legislative function.”

Furthermore, Wilson declared, he “did not think it was the policy of the State of Massachusetts to say that it was a sufficient excuse for a criminal that he did not know why he did it.” Taking issue with the Reverend Murray’s position, West insisted that “law in Massachusetts recognized crime as crime—as something to be
punished,
and not as a disease to be restrained.”

Following a closing plea by Charles Robinson—who pointedly asked whether, “in this century of our nation’s life, we have come no farther than to take a boy, born with a blight inflicted by God, and string him up like a cat?”—Governor Gaston adjourned the hearing, thanking the participants and assuring them that he and his councillors would “take the subject under consideration.”

37

When will the Governor and Council act upon this case? Is procrastination to prevail until the patience of the community is exhausted? Do men in such positions lose that power of reaching definite conclusions which characterizes them in private life?

—The Boston Journal,
May 2, 1875

I
n newspapers and medical reviews, prestigious law journals and shoddy crime pamphlets, the issue of Jesse Pomeroy’s death sentence continued to generate controversy throughout the spring of 1875.

Shortly after the April hearing, for example, the
Boston Globe
published a heated exchange of letters between representatives of the pro- and anti-commutation camps. One of the most eloquent correspondents was Mrs. M. S. Wetmore, the same woman who had written such a heartfelt plea to Governor Gaston several weeks earlier. Once again, Mrs. Wetmore’s appeal was based on her deep-rooted religious convictions—her belief in the sanctity of every human life, in the possibility of spiritual rehabilitation, and in the miraculously redemptive power of true Christian love.

“There can be no greater consideration,” she wrote, “now that the boy is under sentence of death and where he can harm no one, than that his life be spared; but not because it is of more account than any other life. It is the duty of society to protect the life of all its members, and just because this boy has committed such outrageous and fiendish crimes we have no right to deprive him of his life. I would not be understood as having sympathy alone for the boy, when there are those suffering so keenly from his seemingly fiendish nature, and I do not pretend that it is anything but fiendishness from beginning to end. But can the fiend not be exorcised? . . . I cannot help feeling that selfishness, which
is itself unchristian, is manifested by those asking for his execution.”

Mrs. Wetmore’s solicitude for Pomeroy’s life drew scornful responses from many of her fellow Bostonians, including a woman named Kathleen Phipps, who issued a challenge to Mrs. Wetmore: “Let her, especially if she has a family of little ones, give him the entrée of her house in true sisterly manner. Would she or any other mother expose her darlings so?”

Friends of Mrs. Wetmore immediately rallied to her defense. Among her supporters was an indignant ex-convict named John C. Fitzgerald who himself had been the beneficiary of her charity. In language that was shockingly blunt for Victorian Boston (however mild it seems in our own uncivil age), Fitzgerald attacked Mrs. Phipps for “inserting her ignorant proboscis into a matter which is evidently too far beyond the scope of her intelligence to ever be comprehended by her.” There was absolutely no doubt in his mind, Fitzgerald insisted, that Mrs. Wetmore
“would
give Pomeroy a home beneath her roof, if he was so situated as to be permitted to avail himself of it, and if the nature of the case permitted such an action on her part. There are cases where she
has
made practical application of her theories. One young man, fresh from a convict cell where he had been confined for a long term of years, found with her a
home,
which he so much needed, and her
pure
and
ennobling
influences were the means of his salvation.” That Mrs. Wetmore would readily extend the same sympathetic treatment to Jesse Pomeroy, Fitzgerald concluded, only underscored “the beautiful truth that ‘Christ is yet with us/ And Love is still miraculous.’ ”