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 *jDRESS OF GOVERNOR EDWARD F. DUNNE OF 
 ILLINOIS AT THE GOVERNORS’ CONFERENCE 
 BOSTON, MASS., AUGUST, 1915. 
 
 • «> 
 
 • • 
 
 The Abolition of Capital Punishment. 
 
 In 1901, there was convicted of murder, in the city of Chicago, 
 
 one Svnon ; he was condemned to die. 
 
 His case was appealed to the Supreme Court which reversed 
 the lower court, because of objectionable remarks by the trial 
 judge while the accused was on the witness stand. 
 
 Synon’s second trial was held in the court over which I had, at 
 that time, the honor to preside. He was acquitted after many 
 reputable men had testified that he was four miles from the scene ot 
 
 the crime when it was committed. . .. . . , , 
 
 This man was saved by a few harsh and prejudicial words ot 
 the judge before whom he was first tried ; and thus the errors, upon 
 which he’was able to appeal, became the means through which it 
 was possible for him to establish his innocence. Only those words, 
 which the court had committed an error in uttering, stood between 
 him and the death penalty, between justice and the cruel tiagedy ot 
 
 which my State would have been guilty. _ 
 
 - Onlv a year or two ago, Ray Pfanschmidt, a young man living 
 near Quincy, in my State, was accused of murdering his father 
 mother, and sweetheart, and of burning the house over their dead 
 bodies. He was convicted of the murder of his father and sentenced 
 to the gallows. Fortunately, he was able to appeal to the Supreme 
 Court where a new trial was granted. A change of venue was taken 
 
 and, in another county, he was acquitted. . 
 
 A few days ago, one of our most honored judges, a man who 
 has served our judiciary with splendid efficiency, resigned and 
 retired, I am told, a disappointed and broken hearted man. bor 
 nearly twenty years he has carried a growing burden of suspicion 
 that two men he had sentenced to State prison for life were inno¬ 
 cent. Twenty-two of the judges of Cook County, including this 
 judge, have stated to me, in wrung and by word of mouth, then 
 opinion that these two men were not guilty I he records of the 
 case, viewed in the dispassionate light of to-day, reveal striking y 
 flimsy evidence on which to convict of murder. 
 
 Our Legislature this year enacted a law making it possible 
 to parole life men after they have served twenty years; and the 
 first act under this new law was the release of these two men. 
 
 What a tragedy! What a stain upon Illinois’ name would have 
 been the execution of these two men*if they had been sentenced to 
 death. Even the ages could not have removed it. 
 
 ILLINOIS STATE LIBRARY 
 
 129 00654 324 3 
 
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 f jft•wa^.suchlc^gsf.afe! these:that have set me to thinking and' 
 investigating and my conscience, reinforced by the results of my 
 inquiries* jlSis/m^de t&e g firm believer that capital punishments 
 wrong in rfretrry'gilij; 
 
 Before our last General Assembly I urged repeatedly the repeal 
 of our capital punishment code, recommending it in my messag ^ 
 and pleading for it in person before both houses of the Legislatui^ 
 
 The repeal bills failed, but I am quite sure the agitation they 
 stirred up has had a marked and beneficial effect upon the State’s 
 conscience and has aroused and formulated a new public opinion. 
 The press and the leaders among men and women engaged in the 
 great humanitarian enterprises of our State rallied to the measure 
 with a wonderfully inspiring spirit. 
 
 The principal argument advanced, in support of capital punish¬ 
 ment, is that it acts as a deterrent. If I could convince myself 
 that this were true, my views might be different. If society needed 
 this awful penalty to protect itself, on the theory of self-defense, 
 there might be some force and logic in the argument of those who 
 favor its retention, because society collectively has the same right 
 that a man individually has to protect its life. 
 
 I doubt if it ever did deter. I am certain that it does not now 
 deter. On the contrary, all the evidences of history and of statistics 
 are that it never did deter. We find on consulting our history that, 
 in the days when the penalties for crime were the most severe, 
 crimes themselves were the most numerous. 
 
 In England, in 1699, there was an agitation for penal reforms. 
 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Pope Clement XI estab¬ 
 lished a juvenile prison. Over its doors appeared these words: 
 “Clement, XI, Supreme Pontiff, reared this prison for the reforma¬ 
 tion and education of criminal youths and to the end that those who, 
 when idle, had been injurious to the State, might, when better 
 instructed and trained, become useful to society.” Inside the prison, 
 printed on a slab, were these words: “It is little use to restrain 
 criminals by punishment unless you reform them by education.” 
 
 Reforms lagged until 1728, when they were again urged with 
 force. Chancellor Blackstone, in 1765, published his commentaries 
 and laid before the English people the utter folly of awful and 
 extreme penalties. Penal reform in our English system may be said 
 to have begun then. 
 
 But even at the opening of the nineteenth century, the English 
 criminal code was excessively rigid and bloody. 
 
 Parliament, in March, 1816, repealed the death penalty for lar¬ 
 ceny. At that time, George Barnett, a boy of ten years, under con¬ 
 viction of larceny, was in Newgate prison awaiting excution. 
 
 Punishment by death at one time in England could legally be 
 inflicted for more than 200 different offenses. It was a capital 
 offense to pick a man’s pocket, to steal five shillings from a shop, 
 to catch and steal a fish, to cut down a tree, to harbor an offender 
 against the excise laws, to steal a sheep, or an ox or a horse, to com¬ 
 mit larceny of almost any kind. Seventy-two thousand thieves 
 were hanged, at the averaged rate of 2,000 a year, during the reign 
 of Henry VIII. Some offenses at that time were punishable by 
 
3 
 
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 boiling to death. One morning during the reign of George III, 
 before the rising of the sun, in the city of London, twenty persons 
 were executed for stealing from the person. In the year 1785, 
 ninety-seven persons were executed in London for stealing from a 
 shop to the value of five shillings. 
 
 Often the prisons were full of children, many under the age of 
 ten, who had been informed upon for theft. 
 
 Neither the old Mosaic theory of retribution and revenge—an 
 eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—neither that, nor degrada¬ 
 tion, whipping, branding, hanging, maiming, chambers of torture, 
 broken bodies on the wheel, bones fractured on the rack, arms and 
 legs suspended with heavy weights attached, the burning of the 
 flesh and the searing of the skin with white hot iron, roasting the 
 human bodies on slow fires, burial alive, tossing of the culprit into 
 a den of wild beasts, pouring molten lead into the ears, placing 
 men’s faces upward to the flaming sun, tying by the seaside, so that 
 drowning would follow the rising tide—all these have been tried 
 and victims of these indescribable horrors have given up their 
 lives by the thousands, and yet criminals did not become extinct, 
 and I believe history will demonstrate that crime increased rather 
 than decreased under these frightful penalties. 
 
 I am not going to attempt to support my arguments by elabor¬ 
 ate quotations from statistics. There are certain figures, however, 
 which are rather significant, if not conclusive. I refer to the statis¬ 
 tics of the Federal Census bureau of 1910, with reference to thf 
 effect of the death penalty upon the commission of murder. These 
 statistics show that in twenty-one of the states having the highest 
 number of homicides per capita in the population, there is not a 
 single state that has abolished capital punishment. These twenty- 
 one are those which have enforced the death penalty from the time 
 of their organization. Following these twenty-one states come 
 three states, Illinois, Maryland and Kansas, all having the same 
 number per capita of homicides. Of these states, Kansas has abol¬ 
 ished the death penalty; Illinois and Maryland have retained it. 
 
 Let us now consider the twenty states which these statistics show 
 to have the lowest number of homicides per capita. Among these 
 twenty, are all the states but one (Kansas) that have abolished capital 
 punishment. The Federal statistics, to my mind, show that capital 
 punishment has failed to act as a deterrent, and that in the states 
 where it has been abolished, there is a less per capita of homicides 
 than in the states where it has been retained. Go into Wisconsin, a 
 state which borders upon ours. We, in Illinois, have had capital 
 punishment since we were admitted to the Union, and, even while 
 it was a territory, capital punishment was inflicted for murder. 
 Wisconsin abolished this penalty years ago. Yet homicides per 
 capita are almost twice as many in Illinois as in Wisconsin. 
 
 Up to 1913, six states had abolished capital punishment, Wash¬ 
 ington followed in that year. The United States statistics of 1910, 
 show that five of these are among the twenty with the lowest per 
 capita of homicides, each with a percentage less than .08 in each 
 10,000 of population. The other noncapital punishment state— 
 
V 
 
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 Kansas—had the same per capita of homicides as Illinois and Mary¬ 
 land, both capital punishment states. 
 
 Illinois was disgraced by 651 homicides in 1910, after a century 
 of enforcement of capital punishment, while in Wisconsin, where 
 it had been abolished, the homicides have not been much over fifty 
 per cent, per capita, of those committed in Illinois. 
 
 If protection of society, if reformation of the criminal, if segre¬ 
 gation of an anti-social element of our population, if either of these 
 is the end or all of them are desired, then the separation from 
 society of our criminals in decent, humane, wholesome, and Chris¬ 
 tian surroundings, will accomplish all that we, as children of one 
 Father, have a right to accomplish. He has not delegated to us fur¬ 
 ther power or right over our fellows. The Holy Scriptures, so 
 often quoted in support of retribution, commands the human race 
 not to kill. 
 
 If it is wrong for one man to kill another, if it is a crime for 
 three men to kill one man, or for a dozen men to kill one man, if 
 it is a crime for one man to rape, is it not equally criminal for 
 twenty men to kill one man or to commit this other unmentionable 
 crime? The increase in number of participants and their organized 
 embodiment, do not make it a right or a virtue for them to kill or 
 to rape. 
 
 Christianity long ago revoked the doctrine of a tooth for a 
 tooth, and an eye for an eye. Christ prayed the Father, as He saw 
 the thief hanging by His side; “Father, forgive them, for they 
 know not what they do.” Christ himself was suffering the linger¬ 
 ing tortures of death at the hands of passion and fury. He did not 
 seek the destruction of those who were murdering Him and the 
 thief by His side, but He prayed that they should see and know 
 God’s truth. 
 
 Verily, God himself has reserved to Himself the final penalty 
 for the sins of His children. 
 
 Criminals have been divided into three classes; first, the 
 instinctive criminal; second, the habitual criminal; third, the occa¬ 
 sional or single offender. 
 
 The instinctive criminal cannot adjust himself to orderly and 
 regulated environment. He is anti-social and alien in all his 
 attributes, and is incapable, by reason of physical, mental, or moral 
 deficiencies, the nature of which we do not fully understand of 
 getting out of a bad into a good environment or of improvement 
 by training or education. Such men we have no more right to mur¬ 
 der than we have to kill off the insane, the feeble-minded, the tuber¬ 
 culous, and others whose presence among us entails upon us 
 responsibilities and financial burden. 
 
 The habitual criminal—the criminal by acquired habit—has 
 developed out of environment and the social status in which he finds 
 himself. Many of our crimes against both the person and property 
 are the results of social mal-adjustments and conditions for whose 
 existence society itself is solely to blame. Society has no right to 
 the exercise of retribution—to the life of the offender—when it has 
 denied him his natural and inalienable rights and, in fact, has com- 
 
5 
 
 pelled him to exist and develop in the midst of pinching poverty, 
 degrading squalor and degenerating contaminations. 
 
 Some of the most frightful of the crimes by juveniles in our 
 great cities may be traced directly to an environment which could 
 not be expected to produce anything but the very worst. 
 
 Society itself becomes criminal when it seeks, by violence and 
 the blood of its victims, to-right a wrong committed against it by 
 such product of its own neglect. For this class we cannopconceive 
 of execution performing any function. The hanging of hundreds or 
 thousands of them, even the massacre of their young, would not 
 decrease the crime that springs from the slums and the tenements, 
 so long as the slums remain under the tolerance of an intelligent 
 society. 
 
 The third class includes the occasional or single offender—the 
 normal individual, who, through stress of circumstances or force of 
 temptation, or the unreasoning and unthinking pressure of passion, 
 commits an evil deed. For him reformation is probable. He may 
 be made a useful citizen, and society benefited by sparing his life. 
 
 Among the first and third classes there is no serious premedita¬ 
 tion on the outcome of their acts. The first class commit crime 
 because they cannot help it. Frequently they make little or no 
 effort to conceal their tracks. They exhibit a certain form of pre¬ 
 caution which is inherent in the instinct of self-preservation and not 
 the intelligent mental systemization of concealment or alibi. The 
 third class commit crime during stress or in passion; consequently 
 they are not in a frame of mind to apprehend the effects of their' 
 conduct. The penalty, no matter how great or how severe, would 
 deter neither of these types. 
 
 The other class—the habitual criminal, has probably tasted 
 punishment, but notwithstanding how much has been inflicted 
 upon him, he continues to return to his old ways, because society 
 affords him no other. Consequently, the penalty has not deterred 
 him. Punishment will not cure him, nor will it prevent, nor even 
 retard others of his type from entering upon a like career. 
 
 So we are thrown back upon our only right and duty—that of 
 protecting ourselves and society by a process of segregation, both of 
 those who commit crime and of those who, under our modern scien¬ 
 tific light, we are able to predict almost to a certainty will commit 
 crime. 
 
 Another evidence that execution is not effective is afforded in 
 the records of lynchings and mob violence. Whether these have 
 occurred in the North or in the South, they have not had any appre¬ 
 ciable influence in reducing crime of the character which aroused 
 public fury. Lynchings and burnings at the stake.are but too com¬ 
 mon to-day. 
 
 What community has profited by a reduction in crime follow¬ 
 ing a lynching? 
 
 Punishment for political or religious belief has never hindered 
 its progress. Christianity did not cease its remarkable strides 
 because its early believers were thrown to the lions or were made 
 torches to illuminate a Nero’s festival; nor has political liberty been 
 throttled by the execution of reformers. Fear of death has not 
 
6 
 
 halted the plans or dimmed the faith of good men who understood 
 the consequences of their course. Why, then, should it affect men 
 of evil minds who know nothing but evil and do it as naturally 
 as good men do good? 
 
 My point is simply this, that in no age and among no people 
 does history record that threat or danger of death has stopped 
 men or women, bent on the accomplishment of some purpose; 
 whether it has been good or bad, the conservation of human happi¬ 
 ness and life or its wanton destruction. They have assumed all 
 the chances and when they have failed, they have gone to their 
 execution unflinching. This has been as true of the murderer as of 
 the martyr. 
 
 Phychologists are trying to unfold to us the mysteries of what 
 they call the subconsciousness. The operations of our imitative 
 and imaginative spheres, we now fall back upon to explain, in a 
 way, many things which heretofore have baffled solution. We fre¬ 
 quently remark that crime goes in waves and suicides by epi¬ 
 demics. Even epilepsy is said to contain an element of imitation 
 and habit; for in a class of these unfortunates, seizure, in one, 
 will often be followed by seizures in many or all of them. There is 
 a contagion of noise, of restlessness and disturbance, just as there 
 is contagion of disease. It sweeps from individual to individual 
 and soon sways a mob. 
 
 * Who can say that an exhibition of mob passion and violence, 
 in which property has been destroyed and life has been taken, has 
 pot irreparably damaged the whole community. Those of us who 
 have studied a mob have been struck by its personal appeal, and we 
 have seen one after another drawn into the vortex and taking part 
 in the destruction without cause or reason. We have seen the mob 
 spirit intensified and inflamed beyond expectation of control by the 
 first deed of murder. Like the animal who becomes ferocious when 
 he tastes blood, so the human, when aroused, becomes an unre¬ 
 strained brute at the sight of blood. Men who watched the riots of 
 a few years ago in the Capital of our State have told me that not 
 until the first life had been sacrificed, did the mob lose all restraint 
 and enter upon a wholesale, extended and unreasoning debauch 
 of fire and murder, which could not be stopped, except by great 
 show of military power. 
 
 Of a similar type—perhaps invisible—are the effects of a legal 
 execution upon the community. Its first and most debasing influ¬ 
 ence is upon those who witness it. The crowd about the scaffold 
 is more fearful to contemplate than the struggles of the human 
 wretch dangling to the rope. The morbid crowds, that stand with¬ 
 out, compensate the absence of vision by stimulated mental pictures 
 and imagining which are equally degrading. The whole city for 
 weeks feels a depression that is, in the last analysis, humiliation 
 and remorse. 
 
 Too much importance cannot be attached to the argument 
 that the capital punishment law operates against justice. How 
 many murderers go free because juries will not inflict the death 
 penalty, though they have sworn to follow the evidence and the law 
 and have declared themselves not to be opposed to it. 
 
While it is true that the accused is entitled to his liberty, if 
 there is doubt as to his guilt, it is equally true that many a jury 
 is certain of his guilt, but lacks that degree of conviction which 
 will support a decree of death. 
 
 • Thus the tendency is always towards leniency and the number 
 of judgments of deaths falls to an almost negligible quantity. What 
 better evidence could we have of the presence of a widespread and 
 deeply rooted conviction that the death penalty is wrong. Men say 
 they believe in it, but they are exceedingly slow to apply it when 
 they have the opportunity. Conscience—that still small voice^that 
 controls the human mainspring—rebels and they refuse to go 
 counter to its admonitions. 
 
 Here occurs another argument against this penalty. After a 
 period of leniency, in a community, some atrocious deed is done or 
 there is a wave of crime, so-called. The populace becomes excited 
 and demands the rigid enforcement of the law to the very letter; for 
 recent events it calls for blood. The newspapers and the dema¬ 
 gog grow vociferous and mass meetings pass resolutions. The 
 wheels of the law are speeded up and the first one or two accused 
 of murder are sacrificed, after which affairs assume their old ways. 
 Such instances are of common knowledge. They demonstrate 
 very clearly that jurors trying men for their liberties and lives are 
 not always dominated solely by their own conscience, the testimony 
 and the law, but are influenced by extraneous forces, however 
 unconscious they may be of it or careful they may be to act hon¬ 
 estly. 
 
 Concluding, I want to call your attention to the attitude of 
 those great spirits and hearts of our American leaders of humanity. 
 Our literature, our science, our art, our religion teem with right¬ 
 eous protest against the so-called legal execution of our fellow men. 
 Those who have led us jnto the clearer lights of duty and responsi¬ 
 bility have, without exception, plead for the abolition of this 
 hideous disgrace and bloody inheritance from a brutal age. 
 
 Lincoln wrote: “God helping me, I will never sign the death 
 warrant of any man so long as I live”; Bryant, “I am heartily with 
 you in your warfare against the barbarous practice of punishment 
 by death”; Whittier, “I do not regard the death penalty essential 
 to the security and well being of society. Its total abolition and the 
 greater certainty of conviction which would follow would tend to 
 diminish rather than increase the crimes it is intended to prevent”; 
 Longfellow, “I am and have been for many years an opponent of 
 capital punishment”; Horatio. Seymour, “I am decidedly in favor of 
 the softening of the criminal code”; Dr. Benjamin Rush, “The 
 power over human life is the sole prerogative of Him who gave it. 
 Human laws, therefore, are in rebellion against this prerogative 
 when they transmit it to human hands”; Father Matthew, “i. have 
 been thirty years in the ministry and T have never yet discovered 
 that the founder of Christianity has delegated to man any right to 
 take away the life of his fellow man”; Henry Ward Beecher, “In 
 our age there is no need of a death penalty, and every consideration 
 of reason and humanity pleads for its abolition”; Wendell Phillips, 
 
 I he gallows should be abolished altogether.” 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 
 
 
 3 0112 122541615 
 
 I might continue to quote for a day, but leave these thoughts 
 with you as examples of the aspirations of the leaders of humanity. 
 
 The cold-blooded enforcement of this awful penalty, under the 
 forms of law, is brutal and abhorrent and wrenches the decent sensi¬ 
 bilities of every public official who, by an act or omission, is 
 required to participate in it, including the jurymen who imposed the 
 penalty, the judge who directs its execution, the Governor who 
 refrains from clemency, the sheriff who superintends the hanging, 
 the miserable unknown human tool who cuts the rope. It degrades 
 and demoralizes, depresses 1 Rh r e r ,orse and humiliation the com 
 mumty in which it takes place. It lowers the level of the fine 
 instincts and is fraught Avith the ever present danger that a life is 
 being sacrificed to the fallibilities of the human mind and 
 conscience. 
 
 As the executive of a great commonwealth, I come before you 
 to-day, the governors of sister states, to plead with you to give this 
 subject your honest thought and faithful consideration. 
 
 The tendency of modern government in highly civilized com¬ 
 munities is slowly and surely toward the abolition of capital pun¬ 
 ishment. Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal and 
 Roumania have abolished it. In the United States it has been 
 abolished in Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode 
 Island, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin. 
 
 Ought Ave have still upon our statute books the penalty tha 
 takes human life under the forms of Uav or keep pace with th 
 progress of events, particularly as the records show that it ha 
 ceased, it it ever did, to act as L deterrent of grievous offenses ’ 
 
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