Capital murder

“ The effect of Capital Punishment on the commission of Murder.
Some murders are committed in hot blood and furious rage; some, in deliberate revenge; some, in terrible despair; some (but not many) for mere gain; some, for the removal of an object dangerous to the murderer’s peace or good name; some, to win a monstrous notoriety.
On murders committed in rage, in the despair of strong affection (as when a starving child is murdered by its parent) or for gain, I believe the punishment of death to have no effect in the least. ”

“ Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. ”

“ It was proposed that capital offences should be reduced to—1st, high treason; 2nd, murder; 3rd, attempt to murder; 4th, burnings of buildings or ships; 5th, piracy; 6th, burglary; 7th, robbery; 8th, rape. Arson, piracy, burglary, and robbery were to be capital offences only when committed under circumstances or accompanied by acts directly calculated to endanger life. The setting fire to stacks would be no longer a capital offence: the crime, his lordship said, was no doubt a heinous one; but the severity of the punishment had the effect of deterring prosecutions. ”

“ A writer in the Edinburgh Review, vol. 86, p. 217, speaking of death as the punishment for murder, observes—“The intense desire which now actuates a portion of the community, to get rid of capital punishment even for murder, may be taken as an indication of this excessive sensibility. The propriety of that punishment in the given case, would certainly appear to be distinctly sanctioned by that book, to which its opponents professedly appeal—by reason—and by the all but universal practice of nations. It is the only certain guarantee which society can have for the security of its members.” ”

“ But suppose you let a man go at large who has killed his friend in a jealous rage, what do you do with other murderers?”
“In Altruria there can be no other murderers. People cannot kill here for money, which prompts every other kind of murder in capitalistic countries, as well as every other kind of crime. ”

“ We buy it of the executioner, for the bodies of all public capital offenders are his fees. As soon as the criminal is dead, he cuts the body in pieces, squeezes out the blood, and makes his house a shambles for the flesh of men and women, where all people that can afford it come and buy. ”

“ Can it be said that, in order to evade punishment, the murderer has only to hide or destroy the body of the victim, or sink it into the sea? Then, if he is not seen to kill, the law is powerless and the murderer can snap his finger in the face of retributive justice. If this is the law, then the law for the highest crime is a dead letter. The great commonwealth winks at murder and invites every man to kill his enemy, provided he kill him in secret and hide him. ”

“ I then had plenty of money, and I so much feared the arm of detection, that I returned to New York, joined a gang of low, dissipated, gambling fellows, joined in companionship and agreed to share equally in whatever we should make. We robbed a man on the Harlæm road of $400—he made a desperate resistance. I drew a large knife, which I generally carried with me, and stabbed him, when he fell, exclaiming, 'I am murdered!' Seeing the murder a few days afterwards in the papers, and the Mayor offering $1000, I feared my companion in the crime might be induced to turn States' evidence. ”

“ If capitalists conceive it to be to theirs they too would do them. They do not do them for their interest lies in the supremacy of the law—under which they can suffer loss but do not suffer hunger.
"But they do murder," say the labor unions; "they bring in gangs of armed mercenaries who shoot down honest workmen striving for their rights." ”

“ One sees two men, drunk with their success, gouging and tearing at each other's hearts in Wall Street, and sees their gouging and tearing bring about a panic which takes from the people in an hour over a billion dollars and drives scores to suicide, murder, and defalcation—the two men continuing meanwhile as ornamental pillars of society instead of wearing prison stripes. ”

“ We hear of murders based on jealousy— perverted affection. We hear of crimes based on envy—perverted ambition. All of the best elements in man, when perverted and thwarted, lead to crime.
And these perverted passions will continue to breed crime until men shall have learned to regulate society on a basis that will give full and natural play to the forces within us. But organized murder on a really vast scale is practically done away with.
Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and others like them had great ambition. To gratify their ambitions they forced millions of men to die for them. ”

“ I demand the enforcement of equal justice among men.
"An enraged Italian stabs his enemy to death. The act is murder. This man corners wheat. Puts up the price of bread a cent a loaf and kills ten thousand children already half-starved from insufficient food. We electrocute the Italian and print pictures of the wheat speculator in our magazines as an example of Success.
"In other words, the theft of five thousand dollars is grand larceny. The theft of five millions, stained with human blood, is a triumph of business genius. ”

“ Crime, as an investment, does not pay in this country. The regular burglar leads a dog's life of it; and when you come to the murderer, how few escape suspicion if they do the gallows. I do not know of a case where a murder for money has been really successful in this region. ”

“ The way in which this impalpable sentiment is moving on the question of the death penalty may be seen, first, in the manner in which crime after crime during the present century has been excluded from the supreme sentence of the law, and secondly, in the steady diminution of capital executions throughout the civilised world. If the present drift of feeling continues for another generation or two it is not at all improbable, in spite of temporary reactions here and there, that the question of capital punishment will have solved itself. ”

“ If, on the day following this morn of sorrow and of death, the people, who have seen the blood of a great criminal redden the scaffold, should see the truly virtuous man honored and rewarded, they would dread as much the punishment of the first, as they would ambitiously covet the triumphs of the last; terror hardly prevents crime, never does it inspire virtue. Does any one consider the effect of capital punishment on the criminals themselves? ”

“ Which decision is the more righteous, the one where hatred and fear affect the judgment and sentence, or the one where these emotions have spent their force?
Everyone who advocates capital punishment is really ashamed of the practice for which he is responsible. Instead of urging public executions, the most advanced and sensitive who believe in killing by the state are now advocating that even the newspapers should not publish the details and that the killing should be done in darkness and silence. In that event no one would be deterred by the cruelty of the state. ”

“ That fear is with the execution, and not among the multitude? One is sometimes tempted to believe, that the advocates for capital punishment have not thoroughly considered in what it consists. But place in the scales, against any crime whatever, this exorbitant right, which society arrogates to itself, of taking away that which it did not bestow: that most irreparable of evils!
The alternatives are these: First, the man you destroy is without family, relations, or friends, in the world. ”

“ Later, the law, in order to avert feuds, declared it a crime to refuse to offer or accept pecuniary composition for murder. Government, while it had not yet undertaken to prevent or punish ordinary murders or larcenies, had been driven to apply itself to the suppression of feuds; and the withholding or rejection of composition money tending to defeat its efficient discharge of that function had the properties of a true crime, and was promptly recognized and punished as such. ”

“ They seize all the respectable persons whom they find in the villages which they attack and plunder, keep them in prison, and inflict all manner of tortures upon them, till they have paid, or pledged themselves to pay, all that they have or can borrow from their friends, as their ransom. If they refuse to pay, or to pledge themselves to pay the sum demanded, they murder them. If they pay part, and pledge themselves to pay the rest within a certain time, they are released; and if they fail to fulfil their engagements, they and their families are murdered in a second attack. ”

“ Laborers walked beside bankers, mechanics ascended the platform elbow to elbow with citizens of national eminence, and together they looked down on the face of the victim of a murder that was without parallel in the history of the country. ”

“ When you get home again do not forget what this capitalist massacre has taught you. Those prisoners are proletarians, are our brethren, and what we are doing here in the interest of that gang of capitalist crooks is a crime against our own body; it is murdering our own brothers! ”

“ Statistics also show that the deterrent effect of capital punishment is no greater in those communities where executions take place than in other communities. 112 In fact, there is some evidence that imposition of capital punishment may actually encourage crime, rather than deter it. ”

“ Criminals were used to private sector practices: price signals, competition, joint venturing, and third party dispute settlement.
Crime - alone among all economic activities in communist societies - obeyed the laws of the free market. Criminals had to be entrepreneurial and profitable to survive. Their instincts sharpened by - often lethal - competition, they were never corrupted by central planning.
Deprived of access to state largesse, criminals invested their own capital in efficiently-run small to medium size enterprises. ”

“ The farmer and the merchant rob him with absolute immunity, and irresponsible ruffians murder him without fear of punishment, undeterred by the law, or by public opinion—which connives at, if it does not inspire, the deeds of lawless violence. ”

“ The unrestrained lust for money is always the essence of murder, and the man or woman who surrenders to its spell will kill when put to the test. The law which holds burglary constructive murder is founded on an elemental truth. The man who puts on a mask, arms himself with revolver, knife, and dark lantern and enters my house to rob me of my goods will not hesitate to kill if a human life stands in the way of his success."
"I should not put it quite so strongly of these men——"
"I do. And I know I'm right. I saw murder in those black bead eyes of Bivens's to-night. ”

“ On the other side, the attorneys for the defense conducted this case as a defense against murder not for laborers and not against capitalists. The prosecution in this case throughout has been a capitalistic prosecution, inspired by the instinct of capitalism, and I mean by that, by class feelings, by a dictatorial right to rule, and a denial to common people the right to say anything or have anything to say to these men, by that class of persons who think that working people have but one right and one duty to perform, viz., obedience. ”

“ In the early struggles between the organized workers and the great capitalists, violence and even murder was freely resorted to on both sides, for if the word must be applied to the vengeance often wreaked by the Labour Unions on servants of the employer and on traitors to the organization, the same word must be used with a severer moral implication of the shooting down of workmen at the orders of men like Carnegie, not even by the authorized police force or militia of the State, but by privately hired assassinators such as the notorious Pinkerton used to supply. ”

“ Young has stated that "One murder makes a villain; millions make a hero." Were I to make war upon an innocent people, because I had the power, to possess myself of their territory, their silver, gold, and other property, and be the cause of slaying, say fifty thousand strong, hale, hearty men, and devolving consequent suffering upon one hundred thousand women and children, who would suffer through privation and want, I am very much more guilty of murder than is the man who kills only one person to obtain his pocket-book. ”

“ The abolishment of capital punishment in many States of the Union, through the impulsive sentimentality of a minority, had given birth to an old time evil, that of feudalism. It was well for people preaching mercy for murderers, when somebody else was the victim, but when the crime was perpetrated against one of their homes, their feelings were entirely changed. ”

“ This anarchist, when caught, explains his crime by saying that he had to avenge the death of his executed, or, as he calls it, murdered friends. He leaves the inference that, if he is executed, one of his friends will in turn avenge his execution in the same way. ”

“ This principle was to make much trouble later for the government, for the radical Socialists consider murder a "political crime" if the victim be a bourgeois politician. There are also extremists for whom any prisoner is a victim of capitalism, and hundreds of dangerous criminals were released in Berlin and various other cities in raids on jails and prisons.
[50] Domestic servants, particularly those in hotels, were real gainers by the revolution. ”