Samuel Freeman Miller

“ Notwithstanding the argument that under all former systems of administering capital punishment the officer appointed to execute it had a right to select the time of the day when it should be done, this new power of fixing any day and hour during a period of a week for the execution is a new and important power conferred on that officer, and is a departure from the law as it existed at the time the offense was committed, and with its secrecy must be accompanied by an immense mental anxiety amounting to a great increase of the offender's punishment. ”

“ How far they may permit access of counsel, physicians, the spiritual adviser, and the members of his family, is a matter in their discretion, which they exercise by general rules, which may be altered at any time so as to exclude all these persons, and thus the prisoner be left to the worst form of solitary confinement.
Even the statutory amelioration is a very limited one. ”

“ Whenever a person convicted of a crime, the punishment whereof is death, and such convicted person be sentenced to suffer the penalty of death, the judge passing such sentence shall appoint and designate in the warrant of conviction a week of time within which such sentence must be executed. ”

“ Any person who shall violate or omit to comply with section 3 of this act shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof be punished by a fine of not less than $50, nor more than $500, or by imprisonment in the county jail for not less than thirty days, nor more than six months. Sec. 7. The warden, or other person acting in his stead, who performs the duties imposed upon him by this act, shall be paid for his services out of the moneys provided for the maintenance of said state penitentiary the sum of fifty (50) dollars ”

“ Solitary confinement, as a punishment for crime, has a very interesting history of its own, in almost all countries where imprisonment is one of the means of punishment. In a very exhaustive article on this subject in the American Encyclopedia, vol. ”

“ The peculiarities of this system were the complete isolation of the prisoner from all human society, and his confinement in a cell of considerable size, so arranged that he had no direct intercourse with or sight of any human being, and no employment or instruction. ”

“ A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide ”

“ II. c. 37, entitled 'An act for better preventing the horrid crime of murder,' is preceded by the following preamble: 'Whereas, the horrid crime of murder has of late been more frequently perpetrated than formerly ”