Defaulters Unpunished

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 17, 1878

Defaulters Unpunished.

The suit against Richard B. Connolly, to recover seven or eight million dollars stolen from New York city, came to an unexpected end last week, the chief consenting, through his counsel, to a verdict and judgment for the whole sum. So this famous public plunderer gets off free, as regards personal liberty, and consents to let the authorities get out of his estate, as it is now, what they can! Judge Davis, in rendering the verdict, offered, for the public good, the following eminently just reflections:—

“The worst feature of all is that the whole body of these conspirators go substantially unwhipped of justice. Some of them walk our streets to-day, unpunished, and come presenting themselves for examination, turning State’s evidence against themselves—having failed to do it for any useful purpose against others—to disclose and even boast of their own villainy before tribunals organized for some unknown purpose, unless it be to lay the foundation of escape even from the petty punishment of imprisonment or debt. To my mind, this presents a spectacle so abhorrent to my notions of justice, that, in disposing of the last of these cases—as I suppose this to be—I cannot help taking advantage of the opportunity to condemn it as a parody of public justice. It is a great public wrong that these men should have escaped from all substantial punishment for their crimes. The Court most emphatically desires to be understood that in the rendition of the verdict nothing is to be inferred, supposed, or imagined in the nature or character of an exculpation from his crime on the part of this tribunal, nor as a certificate of character upon which he can seek his new place.”

What Judge Davis says of these astonishingly brazen-faced plunderers, and the shiftless, thriftless way in which the authorities have dealt with them, would apply equally well to the several “batches” of whisky-conspirators in Chicago, especially the “Jake” J. Rehm, who has just been awarded complete immunity by the courts. —The Advance.